The sky is no longer the limit for the Abraham Accords. The stars are.
When the Abraham Accords were signed at the South Lawn almost six years ago, they were not intended to remain confined to handshakes, embassies, or trade. The Accords were designed to grow with the region’s needs, creating a platform for countries to solve shared challenges through practical cooperation for years to come. The next phase of regional integration could be shaped by the countries willing to look upward.
Across the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, water is increasingly scarce, food systems are vulnerable, and climate shocks are becoming more frequent. The Middle East and North Africa is warming at twice the global average, with the Arabian Peninsula heating at a rate comparable to the Arctic. According to the World Resources Institute, the UAE, Bahrain, and Israel rank first, second, and sixth among the world’s most water-stressed countries by 2030, and the entire Middle Eastern population is projected to face “extremely high” water stress by 2050. Morocco’s cereal harvest fell 40% in a single drought year. The region’s food import dependency rose from 10% in the 1960s to 40% today, and is projected to hit 50% by 2050. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have watched the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth largest lake, effectively disappear due to soviet-era irrigation mismanagement, a catastrophe that satellite monitoring could have helped detect and slow.
Climate challenges do not stop at borders, and no country can solve them alone. However, they are exactly the kinds of problems the Abraham Accords were built to help address. As Accord countries seek to reap tangible benefits from normalization, they could turn to coordination on space technology to support food and water security. A Space for Food and Water Security Initiative could address these shared challenges by focusing on practical tools with visible impact: satellite-based water mapping, crop-yield forecasting, desertification monitoring, climate-risk data sharing, and emergency-response coordination. In doing so, the initiative would bring the benefits of space cooperation back down to earth, using advanced technology to address the food, water, and climate pressures shaping daily life across the region.
Each Abraham Accords partner, all of whom are members of the Artemis Accords, brings something different to the table. Israel has deep expertise in satellite technology, water management, agricultural innovation, and data-driven resilience, as demonstrated through the French-Israeli VENµS environmental satellite. The United Arab Emirates has made space central to its national development strategy and regional diplomacy, with Arab Satellite 813 offering a useful model for shared environmental and climate data. Bahrain faces the same water and climate pressures that make satellite-enabled resilience valuable, and its launch of Al Munther, Bahrain’s first domestically developed satellite, last year shows that it is beginning to build domestic space capacity. Morocco brings agricultural experience and practical Earth observation capacity, including the IRRISAT-MAROC system for optimizing irrigation using satellite data and the Mohammed VI A/B satellites, which support crop monitoring, water management, land-use mapping, and drought-risk planning. Morocco also holds a strategic position linking the Middle East, North Africa, and the Atlantic.
Kazakhstan, which announced its intent to join the Abraham Accords in November 2025, would add a strategically important dimension to this agenda. Kazakhstan operates communications and Earth-observation satellites and is building domestic capacity to assemble, integrate, and test spacecraft through its Astana-based spacecraft assembly and testing complex, developed in cooperation with Airbus Defence and Space.
Astana maintains close ties with Russia and China in space cooperation, particularly through Baikonur cosmodrome, a Soviet-era launch complex, that Moscow leases under a $115 million annual agreement until 2050 and a memorandum of cooperation with Beijing’s International Luna Research Station (ILRS). However, Washington should acknowledge that Astana is pursuing a more independent, multi-vector approach to space. Instead of asking Kazakhstan to publicly break with Russia or China, it should offer a stronger alternative that addresses pressing national challenges: a civilian space initiative focused on food security, water resilience, and climate adaptation. This cooperation could help Kazakhstan strengthen its own space capacity while giving the Abraham Accords a practical new area of relevance. Just as importantly, it would avoid the obvious pitfalls of strengthening Russian-controlled launch infrastructure, Chinese-led lunar programs, or defense-adjacent systems.
To build trust and give the initiative a realistic path forward, Washington should start small. The United States could first convene an Abraham Accords civil space working group with Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, Kazakhstan, and other prospective partners, focused narrowly on food and water security. From there, the group should identify pilot projects with clear, practical value like a coordinated effort to map water stress in arid regions or monitor desertification. A legal and regulatory track should follow, covering data sharing, cybersecurity, liability, and responsible use. This is where the Artemis Accords can become especially relevant.
The Artemis Accords establish principles for peaceful, transparent, and responsible civil space activity, including data sharing, interoperability, and debris mitigation. While essential for lunar exploration, these principles are equally relevant to multinational satellite cooperation on Earth.
Therefore, as Kazakhstan plans to formally join the Abraham Accords, it should consider taking the next logical step: joining the Artemis Accords. Doing so would not preclude its existing space partnerships; Thailand, for example, is a member of both Artemis and China’s ILRS framework. Astana’s participation in Artemis would expand access to a growing network of U.S.-aligned space partners, enable stronger cooperation with countries developing advanced climate and agricultural technologies, and create new opportunities with the Abraham Accords.
A Space for Food and Water Security Initiative would give the Abraham Accords a concrete new area of relevance advancing U.S. interests in a strategically important region. It would show that the Accords are not only about diplomatic recognition or trade ties, but about building practical systems that help countries manage the pressures that will define the decades ahead. This type of coordination would prove that the next frontier of regional integration is not only across borders, but above them.