Atlantic Currents : Rim Berahab and the Threat of Climate Change

May 10, 2022

This is an exclusive interview with Rim Berahab, Senior Economist at the Policy Center for the New South, who engages with Helmut Sorge, Columnist at the Policy Center for the New South, in a conversation about the great threat of the climate crisis. Rim Berahab is the author of Chapter 13 of the annual Atlantic Currents report. The Atlantic Currents report is the flagship publication of the Atlantic Dialogues conference. The eighth edition of this report is set against the backdrop of a health crisis that is full of lessons and an economic recovery marked by several social, economic, financial and strategic challenges. It attempts to identify the paradigms produced by the pandemic in terms of education, health, trade, respect for human rights, the fight against climate change, etc. As usual, Africa occupies a prominent place in the analyses and projections formulated by the nineteen authors who contributed to the Report, both with regard to the internal dynamics of the Continent and its relationship with the rest of the wider Atlantic area.

Through this series of interviews with some of the Report's authors, we share with you a little bit more!

Speakers
Rim Berahab
Senior Economist
Rim Berahab is Senior Economist at the Policy Center for the New South, which she joined in 2014. She is currently working on themes related to energy issues and their impacts on economic growth and long-term development. Her research areas also cover trade and regional integration challenges in Africa. Previously, she has also worked on questions related to gender inequalities in the labor market of North African countries. Rim spent three months at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in 2016, in the Commodities Unit of the Research Department. She holds a State Engineering degree from the National Institute of Statistics and Applied Economics (INSEA). ...
Helmut Sorge
Columnist
Helmut Sorge is a columnist at the Policy Center for the New South, where he publishes opinion pieces in the format of international press reviews of current events related to the Middle East and European affairs, and conducts interviews with high level policy makers and PCNS researchers. He is also a lecturer on journalism and the media. For over 40 years, Helmut Sorge served as a writer, former Foreign correspondent, Foreign editor, and Middle East expert for Germany's leading newsmagazine "Der Spiegel" to Washington, London, Paris and Los Angeles. He reported from Vietnam, the Middle East, wrote about safaris, nuclear accidents, visited prisoners on death row in the United States. The German weekly “Gala” summarized in 2011, when his latest book, a collection of biographies ...

RELATED CONTENT

  • October 15, 2026
    The Policy Center for the New South, in partnership with The Asian Network, is organizing a webinar titled “Emerging Powers and the Remaking of Global Order” to examine the growing role of emerging powers and the Global South at a time of profound transformation in the international sys...
  • Authors
    September 21, 2026
    Aircraft carriers are massive and menacing, carrying dozens of aircraft and thousands of naval personnel, supported by an escort of warships and supply vessels. Ships such as the USS Gerald R. Ford are formidable symbols of military power. Yet even these giants can be surpassed in length by the largest cruise ships, including Royal Caribbean’s Legend of the Seas, introduced in 2026. The 365-meter Legend is approximately 32 meters longer than the Gerald R. Ford and can accommoda ...
  • Authors
    July 31, 2026
    Ethiopia continues to struggle to lay the economic foundations of food security for all, more than 30 years after first adopting the East Asian Developmental State Model (EADS) under Zenawi (1911-2012), continued under Hailemariam Desalegn (2012-April 2018), and later shifting toward a neo-liberal, Washington consensus-oriented approach under Abiy Ahmed (2018-present). The achievements recorded under the EADS approach—particularly double-digit annual growth, substantial poverty ...
  • Authors
    July 2, 2026
    Africa is facing a massive electricity deficit that is impacting its economic and social development, and its ability to catch up with the rest of the world. It is imperative that the continent increase its electricity production to connect the 600 million people who are currently without access and to improve the quality of service for the millions who are suffering from frequent blackouts and load-shedding. Economic development in the 21st century will crucially depend on the digi ...
  • June 24, 2026
    Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean have both the potential and the desire to transform their people's lives through Green Industrial Policy. Yet they have long been constrained by structural obstacles embedded in the international system. The current rupture in that system, which ...
  • June 3, 2026
    Cet épisode met en lumière les défis et perspectives du secteur halieutique marocain à travers l’analyse du Pr. Abdelkabir Kamili. Il souligne que la durabilité des ressources marines n’est pas un frein à la croissance économique, mais une condition essentielle pour garantir la performa...
  • May 29, 2026
    This Paper was originally published on tandfonline.com This paper examines how reductions in transportation costs reshape regional economic and environmental outcomes in Morocco. We simulate a reduction in delivered (purchasers’) costs via a transport-margin efficiency improvement – implemented as a margin-saving technical change in the transport sector – within a province-level Spatial Computable General Equilibrium (SCGE) framework. Simulating a 1% decline in transport costs, ...
  • Authors
    Jorge Arbache
    May 14, 2026
    Decarbonization is reconfiguring global relative prices. As clean energy, natural capital, and location-specific assets become dominant industrial inputs, the relative cost of producing low-carbon goods is increasingly determined by geography. Two systematic distortions explain why the expected reallocation of investment toward renewable-rich economies remains incomplete. First, industrial policy interventions, including subsidies, trade barriers, and certification systems, disconne ...
  • Authors
    February 24, 2026
    This Paper was originally published on sciencedirect.com This paper assesses the national and regional impacts of the Marrakech–Fès highway project in Morocco using a Spatial Computable General Equilibrium (SCGE) model combined with GIS-based road network data. The analysis captures how improved connectivity alters economic performance and emissions patterns across space and time. Results show that while overall economic gains are modest, the benefits are unevenly distributed—f ...