Nicosia, Cyprus:
The Middle East is warming to nearly twice the global average, threatening a potentially devastating impact on its people and economies, a new climate study shows.
Barring rapid policy changes, more than 400 million people will face extreme heat waves, prolonged droughts and sea level rises, according to the report released later this year ahead of the UN’s COP27 climate summit in Egypt.
The study found an average rise of 0.45 degrees Celsius per decade in the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean, based on data for 1981-2019, in which the global average increase was 0.27 degrees per decade.
Without immediate changes, the region is expected to warm by five degrees Celsius by the end of the century, potentially exceeding “critical thresholds for human adaptability” in some countries, the report states.
People “face major health problems and livelihood risks, especially underprivileged communities, the elderly, children and pregnant women,” wrote Jos Lelieveld of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Cyprus Institute, both of which supported the research.
The study covers the region stretching from Greece and Egypt in the west to Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, and the Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Iran in the east.
‘Big challenges’
Not only will the Middle East suffer severely from climate change, but it has made a significant contribution to it, according to the report, first published in June in the journal Reviews of Geophysics and updated this week.
The study shows that the oil-rich Middle East is on track to become one of the world’s largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, overtaking the European Union in just a few years.
Lelieveld warned that “since many of the regional impacts of climate change are transboundary, stronger cooperation between countries is indispensable to address the expected negative effects”.
Lead author George Zittis wrote that “business-as-usual routes for the future” would expand arid climate zones, and rising seas “would pose serious challenges to coastal infrastructure and agriculture,” particularly affecting Egypt’s densely populated Nile Delta.
According to the report, “virtually all” areas of life will be “critically affected” by warmer, drier climate conditions, potentially contributing to an increase in death rates and exacerbating the “inequality between the more affluent and impoverished populations” of the region. .
Representatives of nearly 200 countries will gather in November in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh to follow through on the 2015 Paris Agreement, in which countries pledged to limit global warming to “well below” two degrees (3.6 degrees). Fahrenheit) and to work towards a safer limit of 1.5 degrees through major emissions reductions.
The planet has warmed on average by almost 1.2 degrees since the industrial period. In May, the UN World Meteorological Organization said there was an equal chance that the 1.5 degree target would be exceeded within the next five years.
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