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The development of low-carbon strategies in the MENA region
Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) as a part of Agenda 21 (UN, 2015) have been adopted by all UN members in 2015, but they describe a universal agenda but not the ways of implementation and achievements of 17 SDGs. Global Agenda 21 became a continuation of the United Nation's Vancouver Plan of Action (1976) and was presented at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. But the problem of traking progress on the SDGs is an essential task in transition to sustainable development (SD) globally. The 17 SDGs approach the problems of human development from a holistic overview (1). SD Agenda addresses the pressing problems of today and also aims at preparing the world for the challenges of the next century (2).
In the context of transition to SD, the Arab states have differing high-level goals. Having both a number of similarities and differences, the Arab national plans and strategies of the transition to SD may have different priorities due to unequal “starting" social-economic indicators and a significant spread of their values.
However, the lack of homogeneity in achieving the other thirteen SDGs in the Arab region requires the use of different approaches and methods of comparaive analysis and the identification of cluster groups. Several researchers have started to develop tools and procedures to measure the progress of the transition to SD, which was a major contribution to the current study. Moreover, there have been no studies to date of how green energy differentiation correlates wilh the general SD differentiation in the region. The Arab states are united by the fact that all of them are focused on building low-carbon and green economy that corresponds to the SDG 7 “Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all” but follow different ways to transit to green economy. In this regard, this study carried out a multifactorial clustering of the entire array of the 19 studied Arab states in order to identify a focus of groups (clusters) in the context of the transitions to SD. According to the results of the analysis, four clusters group were identified: “green”, “blue”, “yellow” and “red”, which have common trends in SDGs in general and SDG 7 in particular despite the general increasing differentiation in the region, an attempt was made to describe portrait view in the context of the study