Climate change a double blow for oil-rich Mideast: experts

(FILES) In this file handput photo provided by Saudi oil giant Aramco on February 11, 2018, shows its Dhahran oil plants, in eastern Saudi Arabia. – 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 raising temperatures to unlivable extremes. (Photo by AHMAD EL ITANI / Saudi Aramco / AFP) / === RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE – MANDATORY CREDIT “AFP PHOTO / HO /ARAMCO” – NO MARKETING NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS – DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS ===

by Frank ZELLER
Agence France-Presse

PAPHOS, Cyprus (AFP) – 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 unliveable 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 sun-baked 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.

(FILES) In this file photo taken on September 24, 2021, al-Huwaiza Marshes, 420 km south of Baghdad, on the Iraq-Iran border. – 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 raising temperatures to unlivable extremes. (Photo by Asaad NIAZI / AFP)

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 centre of world hydrocarbons, so a lot of the economies of this region depend on a fuel that is basically anachronistic, that we have to stop,” said Sachs of New York’s Columbia University.

“Second, obviously, this is a dry region getting drier, so everywhere one looks, there is water insecurity, water stress, dislocation of populations,” he told AFP.

(FILES) In this file photo taken on September 27, 2021, the solar tower of Israel’s Ashalim power station, is surrounded by solar panels, in the Negev desert near the kibbutz of the same name. – 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 raising temperatures to unlivable extremes. (Photo by Emmanuel DUNAND / AFP)

Sachs argued that “there needs to be a massive transformation in the region. Yet this is a politically fraught region, a divided region, a region that has been beset by a lot of war and conflict, often related to oil.”

The good news, he said, is that there is “so much sunshine that the solution is staring the region in the face. They must just look up to the sky. The solar radiation provides the basis for the new clean, green economy.”

Like ‘disaster movie’

(FILES) In this file photo taken on August 8, 2021, a woman holds a dog in her arms as forest fires approach the village of Pefki on Evia (Euboea) island, Greece’s second largest island. – 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 raising temperatures to unlivable extremes. (Photo by ANGELOS TZORTZINIS / AFP)

Laurent Fabius, the former French foreign minister who oversaw the Paris Agreement, pointed out that in this year’s blistering summer, “we had catastrophic wildfires in Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Lebanon”.

“There were temperatures over 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) in Kuwait, Oman, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran. We have drought in Turkey, water stress in different countries, particularly Jordan.

“These tragic events are not from a disaster movie, they are real and present.”

Cyprus, the EU member closest to the Middle East, is leading an international push involving 240 scientists to develop a 10-year regional action plan, to be presented at a summit a year from now.

The two-day conference last week heard some of the initial findings — including that the greenhouse gas emissions from the region have overtaken those of the European Union.

(FILES) In this file photo taken on July 4, 2021, firefighters douse the flames in an effort to contain a fire near the Kotsiatis area, on the outskirts of Cyprus’ capital Nicosia. – 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 raising temperatures to unlivable extremes. (Photo by Iakovos Hatzistavrou / AFP)

Already extremely water-scarce, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has been warming at twice the global average rate, at about 0.45 degrees Celsius per decade, since the 1980s, scientists say.

Deserts are expanding and dust storms intensifying as the region’s rare mountain snow caps slowly diminish, impacting river systems that supply water to millions.

By the end of the century, on a business-as-usual emissions trajectory, temperatures could rise by six degrees Celsius — and by more during summertime in “super- or ultra-extreme heatwaves” — said Dutch atmospheric chemist Jos Lelieveld.

‘Future conflicts’

(FILES) In this file photo taken on June 24, 2021, a boy walks through a dried up agricultural field in the Saadiya area, north of Diyala in eastern Iraq. – 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 raising temperatures to unlivable extremes. (Photo by AHMAD AL-RUBAYE / AFP)

“It’s not just about averages, but about the extremes. It will be quite devastating,” Lelieveld of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Chemistry told AFP.

Peak temperatures in cities, so-called ‘heat islands’ that are darker than surrounding deserts, could exceed 60 degrees Celsius, he said.

“In heat waves, people die, of heat strokes and heart attacks. It’s like with corona, the vulnerable people will be suffering — the elderly, younger people, pregnant women.”

Fabius, like other speakers, warned that as farmlands turn to dust and tensions rise over shrinking resources, climate change can be “the root of future conflicts and violence”.

The region is already often torn over freshwater from the Nile, Jordan, Euphrates and Tigris river systems that all sustained ancient civilisations but have faced pressure as human populations have massively expanded.

(FILES) In this file photo taken on August 4, 2021, army soldiers using water hoses try to extinguish forest fires close to the Kemerkoy Thermal Power Plant, at Oren in Milas, northen Turkey. – 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 raising temperatures to unlivable extremes. (Photo by Yasin AKGUL / AFP)

Sachs pointed to the much-debated theory that climate change was one of the drivers behind Syria’s civil war, because a 2006-2009 record drought sent more than a million farmers into cities, heightening social stress before the uprising of 2011.

“We saw in Syria a decade ago how those dislocations of the massive drought spilt over, partially triggered and certainly exacerbated massive violence,” he said.

Some of the MENA region’s highest use of solar power is now seen in Syria’s last rebel-held area, the Idlib region, which has long been cut off from the state power grid and where photovoltaic panels have become ubiquitous.

Related Post

This website uses cookies.