Climate Change Is Making the Middle East Uninhabitable
It’s been a brutal summer for the region—and the effects are spreading to the rest of the world.
By Steven A. Cook and Christina Bouri via Foreign Policy
AUGUST 19, 2024
Over the last 10 months, the world’s attention has been focused on Israel and the Gaza Strip. The war that began on Oct. 7, 2023, with Hamas’s attack on Israel has been cataclysmic. But the conflict has overshadowed another crisis enveloping the region: intense heat and water scarcity.
In mid-July, the heat index in Dubai was 144 degrees Fahrenheit. In late June, the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, registered a temperature of 125 degrees. This heat coincided with Hajj season. When it was over, more than 1,300 people had lost their lives. And in Egypt, temperatures have rarely fallen below 100 degrees since May.
It was actually hotter in the Gulf region last summer, topping out at an eye-popping real feel of 158 degrees in the coastal areas of Iran and the United Arab Emirates. That reading and the unrelenting heat this season exceeded the “wet-bulb temperature” at which humans, if exposed for six hours, can no longer cool themselves off, leading to heat-related illnesses and death.
The World Bank estimates that by 2050, water scarcity will result in GDP reductions of up to 14 percent in the region. In 2021, a UNICEF report stated that Egypt could run out of water by 2025, with the Nile River coming under particular stress. Water stress in countries such as Egypt is exacerbated by the upriver flow of the Nile being restricted because of the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Syria and Turkey have been at odds over many years because the Turks have built dams along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, cutting the flow south. And among the many issue that divide Israelis and Palestinians is water and who has the right to tap into the Mountain Aquifer of the West Bank.
In addition to the extreme heat’s significant threat to life and livelihood in the Middle East and North Africa, a hotter region has the potential to destabilize politics well beyond its borders.
Before going further, it is important to underscore that this is not a column about “climate conflict.” About a decade ago, there was a spate of articles on this issue, highlighting the Syrian Civil War as an example of what the future would look like as the globe warmed. Even though this idea captured the imagination of a variety of notables including then-Prince Charles, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, and others, the claim about Syria in particular was based on incomplete data, faulty interpretation of that data, over-generalization, and, as a result, erroneous conclusions.
As the October 2021 National Intelligence Estimate on climate change dryly noted, the U.S. intelligence community had “low to moderate confidence in how physical climate impacts will affect US national security interests and the nature of geopolitical conflict, given the complex dimensions of human and state decisionmaking.” Basically, the spies are saying it is hard to make a causal connection between climate and conflict because there are so many variables that contribute to conflict.
A clearer and more pressing problem is how people adapt to rising temperatures and water scarcity. They migrate to places with lower temperatures and more water. According to the World Bank, as many as 19 million people—approximately 9 percent of the local population—will become displaced in North Africa by 2050 because of the climate crisis. And for people in the region, the destination of choice is Europe.
A number of caveats are in order: First, the bank is extrapolating. It is possible that there may be political, economic, or technological changes that limit the number of migrants. Second, not every person on the move will be migrating because of the changing climate. And finally, some of those displaced people will remain somewhere in the region given the resources necessary to make it across the Mediterranean. (That presents its own set of problems, however. Internally displaced people, who generally settle in urban areas, will put pressure on the budgets and infrastructure of places whose resources and capacity to absorb migrants are limited.)
All this said, in the abstract migration is positive for countries in the European Union, which have aging populations and need workers to pay into generous social safety nets. Yet the claim that migration provides benefits to society remains unconvincing to a significant number of Europeans who oppose large (or perceptively large) numbers of newcomers into their countries.
France’s National Front party, which long flirted with fascism and a coy version of Holocaust denial and rebranded itself as the National Rally in 2018 in an effort to shed this ugly legacy, has become a major force in French politics in large part due to its opposition to immigration, especially from Islamic countries. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the avatar of European illiberalism, built his authoritarian system on fears of the threat that migrants pose to Hungarian society.
Brexit, which British voters approved in 2016, was about a lot of things, but immigration propelled the United Kingdom’s imprudent decision to leave the European Union. More recently, the proximate cause of the recent riots in England was the allegation that an immigrant was responsible for the murder of three young girls at a dance class in the seaside town of Southport. Despite the allegation being demonstrably false, the ensuing street violence suggests that simmering resentment toward migrants within a segment of the marginalized English working class stoked by, and combined with, right-wing populism is dangerous and potentially destabilizing.
Then there is Germany, where in 2015 hundreds of thousands of Syrians sought refuge from the violence enveloping their country. Then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel made the decision to grant Syrians entry. It was a decision that many Germans embraced, but it also produced a backlash that has helped drive the emergence of the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party. The AfD is different from other right-wing populist parties in Europe given its provenance. Although it began as a party based on Euro-skepticism, it has moved steadily toward embracing fascism, downplaying the atrocities of the Third Reich, spreading Islamophobia, and inveighing against foreigners in general. Of course, there is a whole host of reasons for the rise of the AfD and other fascist, illiberal, right-wing populist parties in Europe. But scholars agree that migration is the through line in this phenomenon.
The Unites States has a compelling interest in a Europe that is stable, whole, free, and prosperous. The emergence and success of xenophobic, fascist, or fascist-adjacent parties that make common cause with the enemies of Western liberalism are a threat to that core U.S. interest. That’s why Washington needs to help head off mass migration to Europe. There is not a lot that the United States can do about conflicts—such as the one in Sudan—that drive migration, but U.S. policymakers can help when it comes to the climate crisis, which will contribute to the increasing numbers of people seeking refuge in Europe.
This requires not increasing financial assistance or green infrastructure projects but something both more cost-effective and influential: creative diplomacy. High heat makes the problem of water scarcity worse, which is why people migrate. Using its own experience and technical expertise from managing resources in the increasingly hot western United States, the U.S. government can play a useful role in helping countries in the Middle East do a better job managing what water they have.
The conflicts that span the region make assistance harder, given the fact that water sources often cross boundaries. But that is a challenge that can be overcome. Not only are there technical solutions to the problem of water scarcity, but there are also political incentives to come to agreement even across conflict zones.
Leaders across the region may disdain their citizens, but they have a political interest in satisfying at least their people’s minimum demands, including access to water. Even with all the nationalist huffing and puffing of their governments, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed have a strong interest in sharing the waters of the Nile. Without such an agreement, the political and economic problems of both countries will deepen, threatening both leaders.
Of all things, the maritime border agreement between Israel and Lebanon can be a template of sorts for the way U.S. officials approach the problem of water sharing in the region. There was a range of critics of the agreement in the United States, Israel, and Lebanon, but the actual substance is less important than the way U.S. diplomats brought it about. They separated Israeli concerns about Lebanon and Lebanese concerns about Israel and focused instead on the upside for each country. Once that became clear—the exploitation of gas deposits off the Israeli and Lebanese coasts—it was hard for the two countries that nonetheless remain in a state of war to not agree to a boundary. Despite 10 months of conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, the agreement has not been breached. That is important and suggests a way forward for negotiations over water.
It is tempting to want to place efforts to deal with water scarcity in some broader climate agenda for the Middle East. That is exactly what U.S. officials should not do. Washington should focus on issues where it has a realistic chance of making a difference. There is little the United States can do about the intense heat, and mitigation of greenhouse gases is not a pressing problem in the region because it does not actually emit that much greenhouse gas. Water, however, is critically important, and it is an area where the United States has expertise to bring to bear.
Indeed, helping strike agreements to manage water scarcity in the Middle East is a low-cost way the United States can mitigate the perversions of European politics and help shape the global order to come.
Steven did not use Artificial Intelligence to generate this content.
Steven is the author of the newly published book, The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East.
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