Annotation This book details the World Bank assisted forestry projects implemented in the MENA region over the last ten years. It contains a definition of forests in the region and describes their current status.

This Policy Note discusses the status of Forestry in the Middle East and North Africa Region (MNA) of the Bank. The Policy Note is a product of the FAO Investment Center in Rome, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the Bank. Experience in natural resource management shows that to adequately address sustainable development, solutions must go beyond any single sector, and be cross-sectoral. They must also go beyond technical solutions to include legal and policy frameworks. In the MNA Region, a large percentage of the population lives in rural areas on primarily small pieces of land and in the absence of other sources of revenue to supplement their income. Also because many do not own their land, they are without the means to improve their small land areas to increase output and revenues, thus creating a dependence on the natural resources.

The current report was compiled by the FAO Regional Office for Near East and North Africa (NENA) and is aimed at providing member countries with a source of reliable and timely data on the status of forest resources in the region and supporting them in their evidence-based decision-making and planning for the development of the forestry sector. Most of the NENA region falls within the subtropical climatic domain, but it spans an area that ranges from a tropical climatic domain in Mauritania, the Sudan and Yemen to a temperate domain in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

This volume is the most comprehensive textbook on sustainable development. It has been developed with students and professionals from around the world specifically for those who need a thorough grounding in the subject. Coverage includes: background to sustainable development and global environmental issues; measurement and sustainability indicators; environmental assessment, management and policy; approaches and linkages to poverty reduction; impacts and infrastructure development; economics, consumption, production and market failures; governance; participation; disaster management; international financial institutions; international environmental agreements; and the role of civil society.

The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded in these portrayals is the common belief that the environment, in most places, has been deforested and desertified by centuries of misuse. It is precisely such orientalist environmental imaginaries, increasingly undermined by contemporary ecological data, that the eleven authors in this volume question. This is the first volume to critically examine culturally constructed views of the environmental history of the Middle East and suggest that they have often benefitted elites at the expense of the ecologies and the peoples of the region. The contributors expose many of the questionable policies and practices born of these environmental imaginaries and related histories that have been utilized in the region since the colonial period. They further reveal how power, in the form of development programs, notions of nationalism, and hydrological maps, for instance, relates to environmental knowledge production.