Pathways for Urban Resilience in the MENA Region

Aug 31, 2026

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By Leigh Mante, Ed.

Editor’s Note

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is rapidly urbanising. It faces compounding vulnerabilities including extreme heat, water scarcity, geopolitical instability, and infrastructural and demographic pressures. Cities remain at the forefront of these converging challenges, tasked with conceptualising systems that ensure that infrastructure design, public services, and governance remain modern and locally rooted, to enforce circularity, resilience, and liveability for years to come.

Forging Pathways for Urban Resilience in the MENA Region convenes diverse perspectives from scholars, practitioners, and city leaders to unpack the structural, technological, and institutional mechanisms required to navigate this transition. Across 11 essays, the authors present compelling frameworks on how to leverage human-centred planning approaches, large-scale infrastructure pursuits, nature-based solutions, circular water systems, and clean transport networks alongside coordinated governance to safeguard sustainable urban transformation.

The report also highlights how, despite increasing global emphasis on adopting technological innovation, inclusive and integrated governance remains necessary. The contributors underline the importance of simultaneously retaining traditional knowledge systems, encouraging enhanced vertical and horizontal coordination, and enforcing South–South learning exchanges to scale actionable solutions across the region.

Sukaina Abdul Ilah Al-Nasrawi sets the stage, underscoring how cities represent microcosms of humanity. Building liveable cities requires paying close attention to the preservation of human dignity and social equity. She argues for the development of a new urban planning paradigm that encompasses integrated planning, human-centred digital approaches, and economic resilience, all of which address the region’s rapid urbanisation, high youth unemployment, displacement, and fragile infrastructure.

As countries within the region increasingly pursue mega-development, Mannat Jaspal and Leigh Mante interrogate the risks associated with such ambitious endeavours. Evaluating both the rationale and realities of mega-projects, they call for national-subnational governance coordination and financial and environmental guardrails to prevent cost overruns and socio-environmental damage. Victoria Lee offers a complementary perspective on mega-events, demonstrating how context-driven planning can transform temporary event infrastructure into long-term community benefits.

As extreme heat engulfs the MENA region, Basit Khan, Olivier Pauluis, and Francesco Paparella emphasise the severity of the issue, pointing to the resulting exacerbation of health, occupational, and economic risks. They also present layered strategies to temper the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect intensification through a combination of passive cooling, district cooling expansion, and transit-oriented development.

Building circular systems by developing infrastructure that integrates key resources helps improve efficiency, reduce climate vulnerabilities, and foster sustainable economic growth. Heiko Seitz explores the largely unharnessed potential of synchronising electric vehicle charging infrastructure with solar power and battery storage across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries to decarbonise transportation and enhance grid resilience. Maha Al-Zu’bi advocates for the expansion of wastewater reuse to diversify water supply and reduce over-reliance on desalination, which poses long-term environmental and energy challenges. Dikshu C. Kukreja offers lessons from India to minimise waste loss, leverage low-carbon materials, and develop circular value chains and climate-responsive design. By applying lessons from other countries, GCC cities can scale nascent technologies to build resource-efficient and resilient urban centres.

Beyond the proposed technological solutions, the remaining chapters offer case studies from MENA cities to highlight the importance of engaging the youth and vulnerable populations through integrated governance frameworks. Oumaima El Idrissi demonstrates how youth participation serves as a strategic lever to implement climate projects, acting as a trust-building network between institutions and communities in Casablanca. Leigh Mante and Reem Sagahyroon showcase how formalising a clear framework for internal climate migration would minimise negative health impacts and facilitate safe and inclusive migratory movements in Iraq. Montaser Hiyari doubles down on how resilience is fundamentally a governance challenge, requiring stable institutions and synergised policies to safeguard urban cities, using Jordan as a case study. Nour-Dine Salimi and Idar Hidi emphasise how traditional oasis models and local knowledge systems in Ouarzazate remain core pillars of sustainability that should not be disregarded as technology evolves.

As cities in the MENA region rapidly urbanise and digitise, this compendium offers balanced and practical perspectives to help city leaders pursue integrated pathways towards urban resilience. Through context-specific case studies, it aims to inform policymakers, urban planners, private actors, and grassroot and academic organisations on ways to conceptualise smart, regenerative, and locally relevant city solutions.

Read the monograph here.

Leigh Mante is Junior Fellow, Climate and Energy, ORF Middle East.

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Statetron Unveils 10-Hectare Andromean Class in Qatar

Aug 30, 2026

A Qatar Airways Boeing 777 jet featuring Oneworld livery flying through a clear sky. by Go Journal via Pexels

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Statetron Unveils 10-Hectare Andromean Class Industrial Facility Concept in Qatar

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August 28, 2026

By Mohammad S

In Saudi Gulf Projects

More on AI and Data Center, Manufacturing

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Statetron has unveiled its Andromean Class™, a new industrial architecture designed to integrate artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, autonomous logistics, energy storage and digital intelligence within a single advanced manufacturing ecosystem.

The company is proposing its first Andromean Class facility in Qatar, with an initial development concept spanning approximately 10 hectares and an architecture designed to support expansion toward multi-gigawatt-scale energy storage manufacturing capacity.

Unlike a conventional battery assembly facility, the proposed development is conceived as an intelligent, energy-integrated industrial platform in which manufacturing, logistics, energy, data and maintenance systems operate as a coordinated ecosystem.

Project Scope

The proposed Qatar facility will integrate AI-driven production, robotic assembly, autonomous material movement, digital-twin technology, automated quality control and intelligent energy management.

At the core of the manufacturing platform will be Statetron’s modular 5 MW Power Block architecture, designed for large-scale energy-storage applications serving utility, industrial, renewable-energy and grid-infrastructure markets.

The manufacturing platform is intended to support configurable energy-storage durations and progressively increase production capacity in line with market demand.

The facility’s architecture will also allow production, automation, logistics and energy infrastructure to be expanded progressively, with the long-term objective of reaching multi-gigawatt-scale manufacturing.

Factory Designed as an Energy System

The Andromean Class concept extends beyond battery manufacturing by integrating renewable energy generation, energy storage and intelligent power management into the facility itself.

Under the concept, energy systems will power the manufacturing operation while the factory produces energy-storage infrastructure, with digital intelligence connecting and optimizing the overall system.

Statetron said Qatar provides a compelling environment for the development, citing the country’s focus on advanced manufacturing, AI, robotics, Internet of Things (IoT), data analytics and clean technologies.

The proposed facility is also intended to benefit from Qatar’s strategic industrial and logistics infrastructure, including the Umm Alhoul Free Zone, which is positioned for heavy manufacturing, logistics and emerging technologies and is located adjacent to Hamad Port.

Statetron’s Andromean Class Vision

Statetron said the Andromean Class represents a new approach to industrialisation in which the factory itself becomes an intelligent and energy-integrated system.

The company aims to replace fragmented manufacturing processes with a continuously connected industrial environment where production, logistics, energy, data and maintenance are optimized together.

Lars Carlstrom, CEO of Statetron, said: “The first industrial revolution mechanised production. The digital revolution connected it. The next era will make industry intelligent, autonomous and energy-native.”

He added: “We don’t want to build another battery factory. We want to build the blueprint for how industry itself will operate in the next decade.”

The proposed Qatar development represents Statetron’s first application of the Andromean Class architecture and is intended to establish a scalable platform for the future manufacturing of large-scale energy-storage systems.

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War in Iran Continues to Create Renewable Energy Opportunities

Aug 29, 2026

Aerial view of wind turbines on a hilly landscape under a clear blue sky, promoting renewable energy. by Toàn Đỗ Công via Pexels. War in Iran continues to push governments, companies, and consumers toward greater interest in Renewables. It could even spur Europe to embrace ever more Renewables.

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War in Iran Continues to Drive Interest in Renewables

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By Coco Liu and Emma Court | August 28, 2026

InsuranceJournal

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Floating solar panels manufactured by Hanwha Solutions Corp. on the Hapcheon Dam in Hapcheon, Gyeongsangnam-do province, South Korea, on Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2022. More than 92,000 solar panels floating on the surface of a reservoir are able to generate 41 megawatts, enough to power 20,000 homes; photo credit: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomber

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Six months after US-Israeli strikes disrupted Middle Eastern fossil fuel production and turned the Strait of Hormuz into a naval battleground, the world is getting a fuller picture of how the Iran war has reshaped the economics of energy.

A handful of new reports show how, by dramatically raising fossil-fuel prices, the conflict has also been pushing governments, companies and consumers towards renewable energy, with a clear set of winners and losers emerging.

Global fossil fuel importers have paid more than $330 billion in extra costs — an amount equal to Finland’s 2025 gross domestic product — since the war began on Feb. 28, according to data from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), a Helsinki-based nonprofit. Meanwhile, higher energy prices have been a boon to a handful of oil-and-gas producing countries outside the war zone.

Economies that had moved to ditch fossil fuels prior to the war have withstood the crisis better, too. In China, for example, renewable energy projects added since 2020 allowed the country to avoid nearly $8 billion in fossil fuel imports between March and July, CREA estimated.

These transformations could eventually have an effect on the environment: Overall, global greenhouse gas emissions were relatively contained during the first half of the year, inching up just 0.2% compared with the same period a year earlier, according to an early analysis of emissions through mid-year 2026 by the nonprofit Climate Trace.

“Renewables continue to grow. That does seem like good news,” says Ting So, lead analyst for Climate Trace. But he added that the volatility of disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz makes it hard to predict long-term trends.

Winners: Clean Tech and Non-Gulf Fossil-Fuel Producers

China has emerged as a beneficiary of the realignment, leveraging its dominance in green technology manufacturing at a time when soaring oil and gas prices are boosting interest in solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles.

Since the start of the conflict, China has logged five consecutive months of record clean tech exports measured in dollar terms, according to BloombergNEF. In July, Chinese carmakers sold more than half a million EVs and plug-in hybrids to overseas markets, a roughly 150% increase from a year earlier.

Oil-and-gas producers in North and South America have also reaped windfall profits. As buyers shunned Gulf suppliers, fossil fuel companies in the US, Canada and Latin America ramped up production.

While a ceasefire could erode wartime supply premiums, researchers expect some of these market shifts to persist. “The boost to Latin America’s mining sector could remain,” said Rafael Rabioglio, a BNEF analyst, in the report. As high fuel costs accelerate global electrification, demand for critical minerals such as copper and lithium will benefit major producers including Chile and Peru in the long term.

Losers: Gulf States and Import-Dependent Regions

In the Persian Gulf, drone strikes and explosions have damaged key facilities, including Saudi Arabia’s largest oil refinery and a key liquefied natural gas export terminal in Qatar. Coupled with shipping bottlenecks, initial export losses across the Gulf averaged nearly $2 billion per day in March, according to an estimate from Rice University.

Beyond lost revenue, the war also damaged as much as $58 billion worth of energy infrastructure, which requires costly repairs, according to an April estimate by consulting firm Rystad Energy. The conflict also threatens to stall the region’s transition into a greener economy. “The war has driven up the cost of debt in the region, undermining clean power project economics in the near term,” BNEF analysts said in their report.

Import-dependent economies like Japan and South Korea, meanwhile, are suffering collateral damage. The two Asian nations, which depended on shipments through the Strait of Hormuz for most of their oil supplies prior to the Iran war, had no choice but to absorb higher fuel prices. In Africa, where many countries are net importers of refined oil products, the soaring prices have fueled a broader economic crisis. Ethiopia, for instance, recently experienced currency selloffs, forcing the country to draw down billions of dollars in its foreign exchange reserves to defend the weakening birr.

Accelerated Transition

The burden of higher energy prices has fallen disproportionately on developing economies. Poorer nations spent an additional 1% of their GDP absorbing the price shock, CREA found. That’s more than double the economic drag experienced by wealthier states.

As they seek to break up with fossil fuels, African nations are scrambling to add renewable energy. The region as a whole imported 37% more solar equipment from China in the first half of 2026 than in the same period last year, BNEF data showed. The current boom has spread across the entire continent, from South Africa to Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo and Egypt.

“In countries where consumers are not being well shielded from higher fuel prices, they are moving very quickly to adjust their energy consumption pattern,” said Ethan Zindler, a BNEF analyst.

That same trend is also happening across developing Asia. For instance, in the Philippines — where initial fuel shortages prompted the government to mandate a four-day workweek to save on energy — demand for solar products has surged. In March, the country’s imports of Chinese solar equipment jumped 262% year-over-year.

EV adoption has accelerated, too. Monthly EV sales almost doubled in the Philippines and Indonesia in June and July compared to the same period in 2025, according to BNEF. In India, monthly passenger EV sales reached 30,000 units in those two months, up from fewer than 20,000 units last year.

In the first half of 2026, slight emissions reductions by China and the US, the world’s largest polluters, were balanced out by increases in India and Brazil, the Climate Trace analysis found.

At the same time, fears that this year’s energy-market disruptions would lead to a major near-term increase in coal-fired power did not become a reality, according to the results. Instead, over the first six months of the year, renewable energy actually expanded more quickly, So says.

“That’s a positive development that maybe not everyone thought” would happen, he says.

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Iraq’s Housing Boom: Opportunities and Challenges

Aug 28, 2026

Silhouette of skyscrapers and cranes at sunset in Baghdad, Iraq. by Muhammad Nabeel via Pexels best illustrates how Iraq’s housing boom is presently made of opportunities but also of challenges.

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Iraq’s housing boom is leaving its aspirational class behind

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AMWAJ – 27 August 2026

Iraq/Economy

Lyna Ouandjeli

By Lyna Ouandjeli

In Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, a young professional said she considers herself fortunate by earning some two million IQD (1,500 USD) a month, but that buying an apartment remains a distant prospect. A modest 65 m² (700 sq ft) unit she had her eyes on cost approximately 52.8M IQD (40,000 USD). The down payment alone, she told Amwaj.media, would require saving two-thirds of her monthly wage for two years.

This dilemma is common in Iraq these days. The country urgently needs more housing for its rising population, yet a growing number of Iraqis with relatively stable incomes cannot afford much of what is being built. Despite a construction boom in recent years, the nationwide housing deficit remains substantial, and new real estate alone cannot resolve the problem. Rather, the more important question is whether authorities in Baghdad and Erbil can produce enough affordable housing for those who need it.

Bismayah’s unfinished promise

The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) estimates that Iraq faces a cumulative housing deficit of 2.5M to 3.5M units. A wave of new initiatives promises to close that gap. Egypt’s Talaat Moustafa Group won a 2026 license for a 43,000-unit smart city near Baghdad while Dubai’s DAMAC has launched luxury towers of its own. Iraq’s Ministry of Construction and Housing is also planning several satellite cities around the capital.

In parallel, the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Ali Al-Zaidi has introduced its flagship “One Million Residential Plots.” The platform is intended to boost construction across the country and is set to launch in Sept. 2026.

Those efforts have made little dent in the housing shortfall so far. Iraq’s own department of statistics reports that private construction permits, a rough proxy for building activity, have actually fallen in recent years—from 37,442 in 2022 to 25,934 in 2025. These numbers are far short of the roughly 250,000 units a year the government says are needed just to keep pace with new demand.

The case of the Bismayah New City development, located 10 km (6.2 miles) southeast of Baghdad, illustrates these challenges. Launched in 2012 as a key component of Iraq’s 2010 National Housing Program, the sprawling 18.3 km² (7.1 sq mi) project was designed to provide around 100,000 housing units for 600,000 people under a subsidized homeownership scheme.

A 100 m² unit in Bismayah costs a fixed 83.16M IQD (63,000 USD)—a fraction of the equivalent in Baghdad’s broader private market. Comparable apartments in the capital range from 900,000–9.24M IQD (680-7,000 USD) per m² (10.76 sq ft) depending on the neighborhood. That gap helps explain both the pressure on Bismayah’s waiting list and why so much of the capital’s private housing stock remains out of reach for ordinary buyers.

However, the South Korean firm tapped for the project, Hanwha Engineering & Construction, halted construction in 2020 after Baghdad fell behind on payments. The company only completed around 30,000 homes before work resumed in late 2024 under a revised contract that covers an additional 70,000 units. By Dec. 2024, Iraq’s National Investment Commission said around 21,480 of the completed units had been handed over and were already occupied by residents.

Last year, the investment commission tightened conditions for reopening applications, and claimed that around 70,000 people had registered to be allocated unbuilt units at the flagship housing complex via the government’s ‘Ur’ platform.

Bismayah’s fortunes reflect how building housing and ensuring access are different problems. Initially, the project’s terms for prospective buyers required a 25% down payment, but this was later reduced to 10%, with the balance to be repaid over 15 years. The 2024 contract for the project’s remaining units extended that repayment window to up to 25 years. That repeated loosening of terms suggests the state has had to keep adapting financing conditions because unit costs and household purchasing power do not naturally align.

Similar housing struggles have played out in Iraqi Kurdistan, although in a different kind of market. Over the past decade, the semi-autonomous region’s capital has seen a remarkable expansion of apartment developments, gated communities and large residential compounds. Yet, despite this uneven boom, affordability has deteriorated for many middle-income households.

One study covering 2024 housing prices in Erbil found that a 100 m² (1,076 sq ft) low-income reference apartment cost approximately 91.08M IQD (69,000 USD). That represented a price-to-income ratio of 23.1 years for those who earned the median household income in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2023, approximately 328,680 IQD (250 USD) a month. For buyers already active in the market and with higher incomes, the ratio was 4.4 years.

Unaffordability in Iraqi Kurdistan, as in other parts of Iraq, has been exacerbated by limited access to mortgages, high property prices as well as dependence on savings and informal financing. Erbil’s urban landscape can therefore have thousands of apartments for sale while those earning the median income cannot realistically buy one. Even higher earners face a multi-year climb to ownership.

Iraq’s wider housing problem should not be understood exclusively through the language of poverty. A teacher, engineer, doctor or civil servant can have a stable income and still be unable to accumulate the capital to buy a home. This does not mean that Iraq’s traditionally high rates of homeownership have suddenly collapsed.

Rather, it points to a generational divide. Older Iraqis may already own their homes, while those entering the market now increasingly face having to rent a property, borrowing heavily or relying on family wealth. Formal mortgage financing in Iraq remains weak, particularly in Iraqi Kurdistan. This leaves prospective buyers dependent on savings, family assistance, remittances and developer installment plans, meaning that income does not necessarily translate into asset ownership.

A middle-class crisis

Homeownership in Iraq has long meant wealth and security beyond mere shelter. If younger generations are priced out of the property market, housing risks reproducing existing wealth disparities across generations. This is a trend visible in the Kurdistan region, where the number of home and apartment renters increased by 16.6% between 2018 and 2024, from 228,679 to 266,600.

Housing in Iraq is not only viewed as shelter, but a key economic asset. Where investment opportunities remain slim and financial markets underdeveloped, land and real estate can function as stores of wealth, generating investor demand alongside genuine housing need. However, while an investor can wait for a property to appreciate, a family needs somewhere to live. The dramatic dinar devaluation in 2020 appears to have reinforced this dynamic and ushed wealthier dollar-holding Iraqis toward property as a hedge to protect their purchasing power.

Corruption compounds Iraq’s affordability problem, with real estate reportedly becoming a favored vehicle for money laundering. Wealthy individuals and politically connected groups have been accused of funnelling illicit funds into real estate, partly to avoid growing scrutiny of international money transfers. Experts blame this for driving up prices unrelated to genuine housing needs. Against this backdrop, one housing-sector official alleged to Amwaj.media that businessmen have at times acquired and resold subsidized units at a profit, with officials often turning a blind eye.

But the private sector and rampant corruption cannot hold all the blame for Iraq’s housing woes. The authorities have repeatedly intervened by building and subsidizing public housing units directly. Still, Iraqi Kurdistan’s experience shows this too can fail to deliver affordability. Between 2011 and 2013, government-subsidized housing units in the Kurdistan region were estimated to cost between 60–80% more than comparable private-market alternatives, while household incomes rose only marginally.

Researchers have attributed the gap less to graft than to fragmented procurement, where units pass through multiple approval stages and absorb costly revisions once awarded. Access is also largely tied to state employment rather than open-market choice. The real subsidy lies in 25-year, below-market financing rather than a lower price, which makes beneficiaries’ own monthly payments more accessible—but in practice, no cheaper than the private market.

The debate on housing in Iraq focuses mainly on how many units get built, and less on who ultimately captures their value once construction ends. A government that subsidizes property without controlling eligibility, resale and affordability risks underwriting private wealth rather than affordable housing. The country’s real estate market needs conditions for investors to profit from housing that Iraqis can afford; with public land could go to developers only in exchange for binding affordability requirements.

Housing projects like Bismayah show that federal Iraq can build at an extraordinary scale, while Erbil shows how a construction boom can coexist with severe affordability constraints. Together, both point to a national housing system that remains dangerously out of alignment. A generation of aspirational Iraqis who can work but cannot convert their income into assets will remain caught in a crisis of social mobility, not just a housing shortage.

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Lyna Ouandjeli

Lyna Ouandjeli is a researcher and consultant specializing in geopolitics, conflict analysis, migration, governance and international … Full Bio

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US-Iran War Spurs Energy Transition Across Continents

Aug 27, 2026

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BRUSSELS/LONDON/SINGAPORE, Aug 26 (Reuters) – Six months into the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, governments across Europe and Asia are scrambling to accelerate a renewables build-out in a bid to cut dependence on fossil fuel imports, providing a fresh impetus to the global energy transition.

As the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has choked off a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) shipments, governments from South Korea and Thailand to the European Union have pledged to increase funding for renewables.

Has the conflict delivered a boon to the clean energy transition? Here are some ways to measure the impact.

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US-Iran War Spurs Energy Transition Across Continents

RENEWABLES ARE SURGING, BUT COAL IS ALSO UP

Renewable power output is soaring across the world, and the International Energy Agency (IEA) expects it to become the top electricity source for the first time this year.

Since the war began, rooftop solar has proved attractive because it is quick and cheap to install. In the Philippines, high power prices driven by costlier imported fuel are pushing households and businesses onto solar, while a battery subsidy scheme is fuelling a rooftop resurgence in Australia.

European demand for rooftop systems has also jumped since the war began.

But coal is rising too. With the Strait of Hormuz closed and renewables still unable to guarantee round-the-clock power, coal-fired generation is set to grow — though the IEA’s forecast 8.5% jump in renewable output this year dwarfs the 1.4% rise in coal.

In the United States, where President Donald Trump has opposed green energy, renewable generation rose 10% in the first half of the year from the same period in 2025.

EMISSIONS ARE STILL CLIMBING

Even as renewable generation surges, the IEA expects emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change to rise 1.1% this year to an all-time high of 14.2 billion tonnes.

In 2027, the IEA expects coal output to dip by 0.7%, but gas-fired power generation to rise 1.5% from this year’s levels. Curbing climate change will require even more renewable energy and investments in power grids and energy storage.

ASIA BEARS THE BRUNT

Asian economies most dependent on oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz have absorbed the sharpest shock.

China leaned hard into solar, with output rising more than three times as fast as coal between March and July. India, Vietnam and South Korea went the other way, burning more coal. Some European countries also saw extra coal burn, but the IEA expects EU coal generation to resume its decade-long decline in 2026.

Last month, the Vietnamese government said it was considering building more coal plants to secure supply — despite pledging at the 2021 U.N. climate summit to build no new coal after 2030.

TRANSPORT

Most of the world’s oil is burned as transport fuel — in cars, trucks, ships and planes. The war has not collapsed that demand, but it has reversed the growth forecasters had pencilled in.

Higher prices, reduced air travel, softer Chinese consumption and faster EV adoption mean the world is now likely using less oil for transport than projected before the war. Goldman Sachs estimates gasoline-related demand fell about 20% at the April peak of the disruption; GL Consulting puts the drop nearer 15%.

Costlier fuel has pushed drivers toward EVs, and China — the world’s biggest maker — has seen its EV export value top $10 billion for the first time this year.

Electric models made up 63% of the country’s passenger-car retail sales in June, up from 53% a year earlier, according to BofA analysts, who estimate electrification explains roughly a third of China’s year-to-date decline in crude imports.

EV sales have also soared across Europe since the war began as high oil prices have caused pain at the pump.

HOW LONG WILL IT LAST?

As long as Hormuz stays shut, high oil and gas prices are likely to persist, strengthening the case for countries to invest in cheaper, home-grown renewables and reduce their exposure to volatile fuel costs. But whether a shift away from oil and gas gathers even more momentum is difficult to predict.

“Changing a nation’s energy mix requires investments, and higher interest rates will make the considerable upfront capital required for renewables and power grids more expensive. Thus, while the present conflict is likely to ultimately favour decarbonization, it is not a one-way street,” said Sverre Alvik, vice president and energy transition outlook director at DNV.

Many large Asian markets have substantial gas and coal resources to provide a buffer against Middle East supply disruptions and a lot more U.S. LNG supply is expected to come online between 2026 and 2030.

“As this supply materialises, LNG should become more affordable for import-dependent Asian markets, reducing the incentive for a permanent shift away from gas driven solely by the current conflict,” said Victor del Carpio Neyra, senior research associate at Aurora Energy Research.

(Reporting by Kate Abnett in Brussels, Nina Chestney in London and Sudarshan Varadhan in Singapore; Editing by Conor Humphries)

Pathways for Urban Resilience in the MENA Region

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Editor’s Note

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Statetron Unveils 10-Hectare Andromean Class in Qatar

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Statetron Unveils 10-Hectare Andromean Class Industrial Facility Concept in Qatar

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