Beirut, 27 April 2020 (ESCWA)--The COVID-19 pandemic has forced a new reality to which the world is struggling to adapt every day. In parallel with their positive outcome in the decline of air pollution rates, “stay-at-home” policies enforced in a lot of countries have caused increases in domestic violence and unemployment rates.
 

The Expert Group Meeting is organized by ESCWA in cooperation with UNCTAD. The participants included high-level economists and experts from Arab universities and think tanks and representatives of Arab regional and sub-regional organizations such as the League of Arab States and the Arab Maghreb Union. The meeting aimed to critically review the drafts of the recurrent publication on the third edition of assessing Arab economic integration and the non-recurrent publication on trade costs in the Arab region. The meeting discussed also the findings of the World Investment Report 2019 prepared by UNCTAD.

The Arab Climate Outlook Forum (ArabCOF), cutting across multiple Regional Associations, was established following the decision of the Executive Office of the Council of Minsters responsible for Meteorology and Climate, under the League of Arab States, endorsed in April 2017.
The Scoping Meeting for the Establishment of the ArabCOF held in Amman, October 2014 agreed on the following key objectives of the forum:
• Generate consensus outputs on seasonal forecasts (1-2 per year) and to carry out regional climate change assessments.

After 21 years of cooperation, ESCWA and the German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR) marked the official end of their mutual project on the management of water resources in the ESCWA region, on 8 July 2013. The project team met one last time in the presence of the representative of the Embassy of Germany in Beirut Hanan Abu-Rida, and staff from different ESCWA divisions. BGR is the central scientific authority providing advice to the Federal Government of Germany and to the private sector in all geo-related issues.