Middle East heating nearly twice as fast as global average: report

Middle East heating nearly twice as fast as global average: report

Nicosia: The Middle East is heating at nearly twice the global average, threatening potentially devastating impacts on its people and economies, a new climate study shows. Barring swift policy changes, its more than 400 million people face extreme heatwaves, prolonged droughts and sea level rises, said the report released ahead of the UN’s COP27 climate summit in Egypt later this year.

The study found an average increase of 0.45 degrees Celsius per decade across the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean region, based on data for 1981-2019, during which the global average rise was 0.27 degrees per decade. Without immediate changes, the region is projected to heat up by five degrees Celsius by the end of the century, possibly exceeding “critical thresholds for human adaptability” in some countries, the report states.People “will face major health challenges and risks of livelihood, especially underprivileged communities, the elderly, children and pregnant women”, wrote Jos Lelieveld of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Cyprus Institute, which both provided support for the research. The study covers the region stretching from Greece and Egypt in the west through to Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, and the Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates as