Frederic Wehrey
The Jabal Akhdar
With its thickly forested slopes and bucolic meadows, the aptly named Jabal Akhdar seem a world away from Fezzan. Rising 800 meters above sea level (about 2,600 feet) and stretching350 kilometers (about 215 miles) from Benghazi in the south to Derna in the north, the mountains are Libya’s wettest region and home to its densest concentration of trees and its most arable land. It is also rich in biodiversity: though it constitutes just 1 percent of Libya’s surface area, Jabal Akhdar accounts for anywhere from 50 to 75 percent of its plant species, leading one climate activist from the area to dub the mountains and their forests “the lung of Libya.”
Though its populace lacks significant communal divides, the mountains have been the site of political instability and grievances against the government, especially given eastern Libya’s perception of relative decline after Qaddafi’s 1969 coup toppled the eastern-based Senussi dynasty. During the 1990s, these grievances informed a fierce Islamist insurgency against the regime that used the fortress-like gorges and caves of the Jabal Akhdar as a haven. Since the fall of Qaddafi, successive rounds of violence in eastern Libya, particularly during the 2014–2018 war that wracked Benghazi and Derna, only worsened the region’s environmental deterioration and vulnerability to climate change.
Today, the region is firmly under the control of Haftar and his Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF), who are nominally part of the GNU in Tripoli but who in practice govern eastern Libya as a separate administrative territory. Although Tripoli and the east have working-level coordination and collaboration on some issues, such as meteorological data collection and the exchange of research on seed varieties, steps toward more national-level climate cooperation invariably fall victim to the same elite rivalries and factionalism that plague other aspects of Libya’s governance. Simultaneously, Haftar’s kleptocratic rule is exacting a severe toll on environmental protection in the Jabal region.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the activities of the LAAF Military Investment Authority. This organization is a profit-making enterprise for the Haftar family and has been involved in predatory illicit enterprises such as fuel smuggling and scrap metal harvesting. Reportedly, some of the illegally acquired scrap metal (which often is sold abroad) comes from equipment and components of the MMR.
The inhabitants of the Jabal Akhdar acutely feel the nexus of governance, climate change, and environmental devastation. As elsewhere, farmers in the area suffered from problems like electrical outages, supply chain disruptions (particularly seeds), rising costs of drilling for groundwater, and soil erosion caused by overgrazing and poor land management. All of these issues have been compounded by climate-induced temperature spikes and declining rainfall.
Furthermore, the region’s beekeepers—a niche but important industry, especially in the east, where honey is particularly prized for delicacies and traditional remedies—have seen their honey output decline drastically as climate change has pushed temperatures to ranges that are inhospitable for bees.
But the most catastrophic environmental affliction in the mountains is the rampant loss of tree and vegetation cover. Between 2005 and 2019, the Jabal Akhdar lost over 14,000 hectares of forest, with the rate of deforestation accelerating after 2011 as insecurity and lawlessness encouraged people to sell wood for charcoal and to embark on unchecked construction.
Government efforts to crack down on such illegal practices have been uneven, with better-armed militias and criminal groups sometimes responding to enforcement efforts with heavy gunfire. Conflicts in the east and elsewhere have also exacerbated deforestation as urban areas have expanded and new settlements have emerged to accommodate displaced persons.
Regardless of reason, the effects of deforestation have been uniformly harmful for citizens’ livelihoods, health, and properties. Deprived of tree cover, the average mean temperature in the area has risen, which in turn has made outbreaks of wildfires more likely. Already, soaring heat waves have sparked outbreaks of such destructive blazes, like the ones in 2013 and 2021 that swept through forests near Shahat and Al-Bayda, respectively. The absence of tree cover has also contributed to soil erosion and decreased agricultural outputs, while also increasing the prevalence of dust storms originating from the region.
More broadly, the human-caused transformation of the region’s natural environment, along with widespread corruption and decaying infrastructure, has worsened the damage from climate-induced floods like those that hit the eastern city of Al-Bayda in late 2020, displacing thousands. Most tragically, the city of Derna at the foothills of the Jabal Akhdar suffered a catastrophic loss of life—an estimated at 11,200 people—after two aging dams collapsed during Storm Daniel in early September 2023.
The same storm also displaced more than 40,000 people from Derna and other locales. The impact of Storm Daniel underscores how the malignant effects of politics and militia rule magnify climate shocks in Libya: in the case of Derna, Haftar’s military regime had long targeted and isolated the town because it had a history of opposition to his authority. This animosity contributed to the municipality’s unpreparedness and to the storm’s staggering death toll.
The aftermath of the Derna tragedy has made it clear that local actors need to have both the capacity and the freedom to tackle climate adaptation and environmental stewardship. Municipalities in and around the Jabal Akhdar, as elsewhere, have taken some commendable steps on these fronts, with campaigns on water rationalization, well-digging, recycling drives, electricity conservation, and other actions toward sustainability.
On the crucial problem of deforestation, local civil society, journalists, and bloggers have been especially active. Reforestation initiatives in particular have proven enormously popular, with groups like the Libyan Wildlife Trust and the Boy Scouts planting millions of seedlings and sponsoring awareness campaigns in schools. Yet according to several observers, these efforts, while laudable, are not enough: Libyan civil society has not yet been able to realize its full potential as a bridge between the public and private sectors and as a voice for vulnerable communities.
The activists themselves admit that their efforts cannot keep pace with environmental devastation, and they point to the need for a better-equipped and more robust response from official law enforcement entities. Moreover, in the east in particular, activists face restrictions from the area’s security forces. Though these forces do not directly target environmental and climate groups as long as their activities do not cross certain political red lines (like corruption or the role of the Haftar family), their presence still has a chilling effect.
“Young people are willing, but they are afraid,” noted one official from the region. “There is no state support.” In a September 2023 interview, a member of a volunteer climate action group in eastern Libya gave an example of such interference, stating that their organization’s efforts to import weather monitoring equipment—to compensate for what this person believed was the inadequacy of the official meteorological service—were blocked by Haftar’s government because of supposed security concerns.
Relatedly, policing bodies in both the east and the west often have a distinctly ideological bent deriving from the Salafi current of Islam, evident in arrests that are not rooted in codified law but rather are against transgressions deemed to be un-Islamic. These arrests have included crackdowns on environmental activism like an “Earth Hour” event in Benghazi in 2017 and, more recently, in the arrests of animal rights defenders in the same city. In such an environment, it is not surprising that many climate activists operate from abroad or solely in the virtual space, while others confine their engagement to politically “safe” activities.
Separately, Haftar’s governing apparatus could try to coopt climate action as a form of legitimation, or greenwashing—especially as the issue attracts great funding and support from outside donors. Arab autocrats elsewhere have pursued similar tactics by focusing mostly on technical solutions, renewable energy plans, and ambitious net-zero pledges while sidelining the society-focused governance reforms and grassroots partnerships that effective climate adaptation requires. The urgency of such local-focused reforms is nowhere as apparent as in Libya’s vulnerable peripheral regions.
Conclusion: Building Grassroots Climate Resilience in Vulnerable Regions
The sheer scale of Libya’s climate fragility demands a radical departure from the status quo. In many respects, climate change accelerates and amplifies preexisting deficiencies in governance and inequalities that predate the chaos of the 2011 uprising and its aftermath. It also introduces new shocks, like heat waves, fires, and extended droughts. These impacts are worsening the health and livelihood of already at-risk populations—those in the agricultural sector, for instance—while creating new stresses on comparatively better-off citizens.
Endemic insecurity and successive rounds of national-level internal conflict starting in 2014 have understandably impeded concerted climate and environmental action by governments and citizens alike. “It’s hard to garner public support for trees when people’s lives are in danger,” admitted an environmental activist in 2013. But the peace that has emerged since a United Nations–brokered ceasefire in 2020 is one in which armed groups dominate the political and economic life of the country as dynasties of venal elites in both east and west carve up the spoils while stifling free expression and civil society. Such circumstances are hardly cause for optimism on climate adaptation.
At the most basic level, that adaptation should prioritize solving Libya’s water crisis by extending the GMMR to communities in need, halting the decay of its infrastructure, and rationalizing the use of the water it delivers. Among consumers, this rationalization can be accomplished principally through tariffs. Farmers can support the process through more efficient practices like the introduction of new seed varieties, a shift toward less water-intensive crops, and more sustainable techniques like hydroponic farming. In tandem, Libya should explore alternate sources of freshwater, like desalinization.
Today, most of Libya’s sixty desalination facilities are not operational, and the industry itself faces a lack of support owing to these maintenance issues and perception of its prohibitive cost. Yet with the rapid depletion of the country’s aquifers, that perception needs to change. Various innovative domestic proposals have been advanced for making desalinization in Libya more economically feasible; one proposal advanced by a Tuareg activist and former official would use dune-generated heat in Fezzan to power coastal desalinization plants. Underpinning all these potential options is the pressing need for a national water strategy and an integrated water policy that will rationalize and safeguard its distribution across the sprawling country.
That need, in turn, speaks to another urgent imperative for Libya’s climate adaptation: vision and will at the top. As noted, the challenge of fiscal and political decentralization in Libya is deeply entrenched. On climate change, municipalities are hindered by legal and funding restrictions, such as the lack of legislative empowerment to tackle climate adaptation and the need to seek preapproval for revenue expenditure instead of having climate change measures built into their budgets.
Beyond this consideration, municipalities need greater authority and leeway and fewer bureaucratic obstacles to expeditiously access foreign funding, equipment, and expertise, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Taqarib project and the European Union’s Tamsall effort. For their part, both the Libyan government and foreign donors should work to coordinate and “bundle” municipal-level projects, more efficiently identify best practices, more easily access outside funding, and scale-up successes.
Beyond town-level empowerment, interlocutors across all three regions surveyed in this article spoke about the need for greater space, protections, and support for civil society actors working on environmental protection and climate adaptation. Many acknowledged that, despite the groundswell of enthusiasm, such activism is still in its infancy. They suggested the need for greater education and acculturation of Libya’s youth on climate change, starting in schools.
These efforts are encouragingly underway by UNICEF in eastern Libya, but they need more buy-in from Libya’s authorities. More pressingly, though, Libyan authorities in the west and the east need to grant greater freedoms for independent civil society groups to operate freely and with foreign support, ending the restrictive laws that prevent them from doing so.
Relatedly, the dominance of Libya’s predatory armed groups over nearly every aspect of its political and economic life needs to transition to a law-based, accountable security sector—a Herculean problem that will not be solved anytime soon. Still, the urgency of tackling Libya’s climate adaptation and environmental devastation adds one more compelling reason for doing so.
In all three of the regions surveyed, interlocutors were unanimous in pointing to the militias as the primary culprits for the weakening of climate resilience, through predation on the environment and, indirectly, through the perpetuation of violent conflict and the resulting population displacements, disruptions to services, and damage to infrastructure and the economy.
Lastly, while the Jabal Nafusa, Fezzan, and the Jabal Akhdar share certain commonalities in their climate vulnerabilities, they are also distinctive subregions with their own communal and ethnolinguistic identities, histories, economic resources, and other factors that militate against the one-size-fits all approach encouraged by foreign states and organizations.
Addressing climate fragility in each of these areas therefore necessitates a multifaceted approach that recognizes and harnesses these local specificities, integrating on-the-ground knowledge, community-driven initiatives, and partnerships with civil society organizations. Ultimately, though, these bottom-up actions need to be accompanied by top-level will and resolve by Libyan elites, who must set aside self-aggrandizement and the pursuit of spoils to address the looming climate crisis.
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Frederic Wehrey is a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where his research focuses on governance, conflict, and security in Libya, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf.
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Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
