"It is the hope of the project team that its research will give special attention to community level environmental identities, giving voice to communities whose opinions and desires are seldom considered in the formulation of national environmental policy."

The Middle East Environmental Futures Project engages in interdisciplinary and cooperative environmental research and outreach in Palestine and Israel.� It seeks to assess the current and future state of the environment in the region and to explore through an in-depth dialogue the environmental identities and desires of the two nations as well as those of many communities within each.� By integrating the natural/physical and the social sciences, it will produce policy-relevant publications that will integrate expert knowledge with community-level concerns.� The knowledge gained through this process will provide a basis for dialogue among community groups, non-governmental organizations, media and policy makers in order to inform and stimulate public discourse and policymaking for a healthier future environment in Palestine and Israel.

In June 2002, an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars/practioners assembled at Brown University for two days of intensive dialogue on environmental issues in Palestine and Israel.� Despite the fact that the workshop was conducted in the shadow of continuing violence in the region, the participants succeeded in compiling a list of policy-relevant research/discussion topics that would address crucial gaps in our current knowledge of regional environmental issues and, in turn, improve our understanding of the environmental future of the region.� Over the course of the following year, the project team designed a 3-year� program, entitled "The Middle East Environmental Futures (MEEF) Project," that will address these gaps by charting the current and future state of the environment in the region from a variety of disciplinary and community perspectives.

In July 2003, MEEF will draw 30 researchers together to initiate the project under the sponsorship of Brown and York Universities.� The program of the workshop will proceed according to the following assumptions:

• Environmental policy must be supported by both quantitative natural/physical science data and by knowledge of how individual communities will be affected by policy, as determined by social scientists.
• What constitutes environmental quality differs among communities, and knowledge of these differences is integral to effective environmental policy.
• Environmental forecasts must be guided by a variety of future economic, political and demographic scenarios, rather than simple "business as usual" approaches.
• Environmental knowledge must be made relevant to populations in the region which are largely preoccupied with inter and intra-group conflict.

Our integrative program includes three foci:� (1) Environmental Narratives, (2) Environmental Quality Assessments, and (3) Demographic/Economic/Political Scenarios.� The Narratives team, comprised primarily of sociologists and political scientists, will conduct a series of national and community level investigations of environmental concerns in Palestine and Israel, and in various sub-communities within each national group.� The Environmental Quality Assessment team is comprised of three sub-groups, each exploring a separate set of environmental quality indicators to document both the current state of the environment, and its future state based on the scenarios set out by the third group, the Scenarios team.� The Scenarios team will map out a set of feasible political, economic and demographic scenarios that will serve as the foundation for the other groups to develop possible future states of the environment.

The output of the MEEF project will be:� (1) academic research addressing the previously identified gaps in our knowledge and, in particular, the shortcomings of previous regional environmental research, (2) a flexible and iterative methodology for interdisciplinary work which allows for scholars of diverse ethnic and disciplinary backgrounds to work productively towards a common goal, and (3) information for initiating a dialogue among policy makers and the general public that can be used to improve environmental policymaking.

It is the hope of the project team that its research will give special attention to community level environmental identities, giving voice to communities whose opinions and desires are seldom considered in the formulation of national environmental policy.� The MEEF participants are committed to producing information well-suited� for public education regarding the environment, and the project includes several components which facilitate a broad based civil discourse about the environmental future of the region.� What will Israel and Palestine look like 50 years form now and what will be the characteristics of its environment? Each phase of the project will produce information (printed, web based� and media accessible) designed to raise the level of public discourse. The culmination of the project will be a series of public community meetings/conferences/media outreach efforts to initiate a dialogue through reporting of results and simulations, in order to help illustrate the fundamental decisions that need to be made and how they relate to environmental characteristics in the future.� Finally, the MEEF project brings together Israeli and Palestinian scholars/practioners within a framework that emphasizes equal participation, tolerance and mutual understanding among individuals, and through an iterative process of feedback from participants, we will continue to evolve the goals and methods such that the project remains relevant to both Israelis and Palestinians.

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