Lebanon’s ecology crisis

Lebanon has been struggling with a lot of various crises over the past two years but there is one that nearly nobody is talking about.

Ecology has never been the center of attention in Lebanon and I don’t expect it to be but we should at least take a look at it.

Even though Politics think that this won’t have any impact on Lebanon’s economy it will because before the revolution, the country’s economy was based on transportation, services, and most importantly tourism. In 2016 tourism contribution to the economy was around 19% of GDP with a total of 338,600 tourism-related jobs invigorated within the economy.

And most of the tourists in Lebanon come to see the natural beauty of the country for a simple reason as we all know Lebanon does not have mega metropoles like the other more advanced Arab countries.

We know that the hall world is affected by climate change but Lebanon can fight it at its own scale and this will not take a lot of funds, we just need the right person in the Lebanese parliament to look at what we are pointing at and everything could work.

The best thing is that in the Lebanese golden age in 1963 to be precise, the Lebanese parliament added a new system to help the Lebanese landowners plant in their land so the country could be greener and help the Lebanese economy. Even at that time, the honest old Lebanese political class knew that a day will come and the nation would have to rely on other things than services to run healthily the economy.

This system hasn’t been working since the civil war, but every year a budget is consecrated to it and it all goes into the hands of the corrupt political class. If we really want to make changes and to heal our drowning economy, we should look at things like this because this is how they are filling their pockets with the money we own.

With the funds of just this old project, we can begin the healing of Lebanon’s economy if we just helped this sector it could be a huge push to help others in the near future, and as I said we just need one member of the government to talk about it and we win. Let’s hope that one of the people we elected is willing to do the right thing just once.

I wrote this article a year ago and since then I have sent it to many Lebanese influencers and many media platforms but no one is really interested in sharing it and this makes me really sick. I hope that on medium this article will reach as many people as possible. Even if you’re not from Lebanon you should read it, share it and most importantly act about it.