The Royal Directive: When the Environment Becomes Part of the Economic Equation

Not every royal directive is simply an addition to the government’s agenda. Some directives reorder priorities and push the state to look at an old file with fresh eyes, and this is how we can read His Majesty King Abdullah II’s directive to the government to develop an integrated, unified national strategy for climate finance, in cooperation with the private sector.

The matter here is not environmental in the traditional sense; at its core it is economic, political, and developmental. The King is drawing attention to climate as both a challenge and an opportunity at once, and he opens up a bigger question for Jordan: how do we benefit from global shifts in finance and investment to serve our national priorities?

The world is redistributing capital, and international funds and financial institutions are increasingly directing themselves toward green, blue, and climate related projects. The countries that have ready made projects, clear governance frameworks, and the ability to measure impact are the ones that will reach this money.

From here, the issue for Jordan is not simply to make its project model greener, but to become more capable of attracting capital that is searching for both the green and blue economy.

Water scarcity isn’t just an environmental problem; it is one of the biggest determinants of the future of Jordan’s economy, and investment in desalination, reuse, and reducing losses is an investment in water security and continued growth. Clean energy isn’t a climate slogan; it’s a matter of cost, productivity, and competitiveness. Drought resistant agriculture is tied to food security, sustainable transport can lower costs and emissions together, and even waste can be turned from a service burden into an economy built on recycling and reuse, while ports, logistics, artificial intelligence, and the coral economy and its future industries are not environmental luxuries.

This is where the meaning of climate finance changes: it is no longer financing to protect the environment, but financing to protect and modernize the economy. Jordan is not new to this equation; it has already succeeded in securing significant funding from the Green Climate Fund for the National Water Carrier project, and has gained an important position within the international climate finance system, and registered its first marine protected area on the World Natural Heritage list. This confirms that the problem isn’t a lack of opportunities, but our capacity to organize them and turn them into a comprehensive national portfolio.

Here, the Ministry of Environment deserves a different kind of look at this stage, because climate finance has not always been at the forefront of the government scene. In previous governments, the ministry’s regulatory and oversight character tended to dominate, some governments were preoccupied with day to day files, and some environment ministers were sidelined from the scene, with repeated travel that produced no results, while the major shifts in the green economy, climate, and sustainable finance remained outside the circle of priorities to the degree they deserved.

Today, though, there is a clear shift in outlook. The Ministry of Environment treats climate as a national file that intersects with the economy, finance, and investment, in line with its strategy for 2026-2029 and its focus on climate action, green growth, governance, and resource protection.

This difference matters, because a ministry that merely applies legislation protects the environment, while a ministry that ties the environment to investment, finance, and development participates in shaping the economy to come, as is the case today.

More importantly, the ministry’s focus on climate finance and its associated governance was already aligned early on with the recent royal directive, which gives greater weight to what the ministry is currently doing. Institutional excellence doesn’t mean starting only after a directive is issued; it means having already been moving in the right direction, with the directive then coming to give the path greater national momentum.

But the royal directive also raises the bar of responsibility, because it is no longer acceptable for the idea to end up as just another strategy added to the shelves of institutions. What’s needed is a national system for climate finance that begins by defining Jordan’s priorities, preparing bankable projects, identifying the appropriate financing instruments, and ultimately attracting the private sector and international financial institutions.

The state’s mindset needs to shift from asking “how do we obtain financing?” to the more important question: “how do we design a project that makes financing come looking for it?” A financier does not buy a beautiful idea; they want a project with feasibility, data, governance, calculated returns and risks, and a measurable impact.

For this reason, the private sector must be a partner from the very beginning, not a guest at the end of the project, and the government must use public financing intelligently to reduce risk and stimulate private investment through guarantees, blended finance, partnerships, and incentives. If we succeed in that, climate finance becomes one of the engines driving the implementation of the economic modernization vision, rather than a parallel track to it.

What’s required is for water, energy, agriculture, transport, tourism, industry, and municipalities to become part of this system, and for projects with climate impact to turn into national investment opportunities, rather than projects waiting for grants.

Here, the royal message becomes broader than climate finance itself: it is about rethinking how development is financed, the role of the private sector, and the function of government institutions.

What’s needed is no longer to protect the environment from the economy; what’s needed is to make environmental protection a means of developing the economy. And this is the real test: do we turn the directive into projects, the projects into investments, the investments into jobs and growth, and the financing into an impact the economy and the citizen can actually feel?

If we do that, climate finance will not simply be money we attract from the world, but proof that we have begun to understand the economy of the future before it arrives at our doorstep.

This is precisely where the value of the royal directive lies, and the value of the transformation the Ministry of Environment is undergoing: moving the environment from the margins of economic decision making to the heart of the equation of investment, growth, and sustainability.

The future will not wait for countries that content themselves with merely managing their crises. The future belongs to those who turn their crises into opportunities, their challenges into investments, and their limited resources into new economic value.

*Former Commissioner of Tourism and Environment at the Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority