Climate change a double blow for oil-rich Mideast

Climate change a double blow for oil-rich Mideast

PAPHOS, Cyprus: The climate crisis threatens a double blow for the Middle East, experts say, by destroying its oil income as the world shifts to renewables and by raising temperatures to unlivable extremes. Little has been done to address the challenge in a region long plagued by civil strife, war and refugee flows, even as global warming looks likely to accelerate these trends, a conference heard last week.

“Our region is classified as a global climate change hotspot,” Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades told the International Conference on Climate Change in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Home to half a billion people, the already sunbaked region has been designated as especially vulnerable by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the UN’s World Meteorological Organization.

Yet it is also home to several of the last countries that have not ratified the 2015 Paris Agreement – Iran, Iraq, Libya and Yemen – weeks before the UN’s COP26 climate conference starts in Glasgow. When it comes to climate change and the Middle East, “there are terrible problems,” said Jeffrey Sachs, who heads the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

“First, this is the center of world hydrocarbons, so a lot of the economies of this region