National Green Growth Plan for Jordan.

This National Green Growth Plan for Jordan (NGGP) is a nation-wide sectoral document aiming at guiding green growth projects and aligning green policies and investments to work for national development goals, mainly included in Vision 2025. It (i) identifies green growth opportunities and Green Key Performance Indicators to be included; (ii) designs a cross-sector green growth policy framework and implementation road-map; (iii) develops a sustainable economy that creates more jobs and achieves social inclusion, while also reducing negative environmental impacts. The Plan provides for financing mechanisms from the public sector, the private sector, donor agencies and partnerships between the private and public sectors. The NGGP also provides a new approach for project clustering by introducing three main green growth clusters to Jordan namely, Green Growth Corridor Cluster, Smart Urban Cities Cluster and Rural Resilience Cluster.
Behind the National Green Growth Plan is a Vision for Jordan as a country with an expanding and sustainable economy that creates jobs, income for its citizens, and is resilient to external shocks and instability in the region. A country of economic opportunity for everyone that provides decent work and living conditions based on an environmentally sustainable economic growth model.
A number of priority projects have been selected (eight illustrative green projects were chosen). They represent national development priorities, require relatively large investments and belong to six sectors, namely (i) transport; (ii) energy; (iii) agriculture; (iv) water; (v) waste; and (vi) tourism. The eight projects are described in detail through a consistent cost-benefit analysis methodology to value the positive and negative impacts of possible green growth interventions.
To help eliminate hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition, the NGGP focuses on agriculture sector considered as a has a great opportunity to produce more of the food domestically and hence mitigate the vulnerabilities associated with importing a high percentage of the food consumed as well as enabling green growth particularly in the areas of resilience, for example through crop varieties that are drought-tolerant, and social development and poverty alleviation. Main interventions are directed to (i) improve the agricultural productivity of land which is currently not being used for agriculture and (ii) introduce new crop varieties.
In order to make agriculture more productive and sustainable, alongside the introduction of new crop varieties, the Plan proposes (i) to increase treatment plants to reuse current water resources and avoid environmental side effects such as water pollution; and (ii) manage water demand and efficiency, including metering and improving water infrastructure.
Reduction of rural poverty will be pursued through the rural resilience cluster that aims to strengthen rural communities and their surrounding ecosystems by diversifying incomes, ensuring resource availability and reducing environmental impacts.
The resilience of livelihoods to disasters will be increased by (i) interventions in the sector that have high GHG mitigation potential; (ii) the introduction of drought-tolerant varieties to help rural communities, primarily, to become more resilient to adverse effects of climate change; and (iii) combating desertification to improve biodiversity and ecosystem services.
As for the Governance, the proposed structure establishes the green economy at the heart of the delivery model, with the Green Economy Unit responsible for gathering inputs from a range of stakeholders. The Green Economy Unit feeds these inputs through a feedback loop with a Technical Expert Advisory Group to the Higher Green Economy Steering Committee which holds the relationship with the Prime Ministry. This governance structure aims to fast-track the implementation of projects and initiatives.