Overall Warming of up to 5°C in This Century Projected for the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East

Unprecedented and societally disruptive extreme weather events, including heat waves, droughts, dust storms and torrential rains, will soon become a reality unless immediate, ambitious, and transboundary climate action is taken, warns latest scientific assessment of state-of-climate in the region.

A new report prepared by an international group of scientists and published in the authorative journal “Reviews of Geophysics”, identifies the EMME* as a climate change hot spot, and concludes that the region is warming almost two times faster than the global average, and more rapidly than other inhabited parts of the world. For the remainder of the century, projections based on a business-as-usual pathway indicate an overall warming of up to 5°C or more, being strongest in the summer, and associated with unprecedented heatwaves that can be societally disruptive. Further, the region will experience rainfall shortages that compromise water and food security. Virtually all socio-economic sectors are expected to be critically affected, with potentially devastating impacts on the health and livelihoods of the 400 million people of the EMME, with worldwide implications.

The report, which was prepared under the auspices of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and The Cyprus Institute, in preparation to COP27, which will take place in Egypt in November 2022, provides an updated, comprehensive assessment of measurement data and recent climate analyses, covering a wide range of time scales, phenomena and possible future pathways. It identifies the region as a climate change hot spot, and also signals that the EMME is rapidly overtaking the European Union as a source of greenhouse gases, and becoming a major emitter at the global scale.

Read more at Max Planck Institute for Chemistry

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