Children sit on a boat in southern Iraq's dry marshes, in Dhi Qar governorate, July 24, 2022. (Credit: Asaad Niazi/AFP)
Dried-up, polluted rivers in regions once referred to as cradles of millennia-old civilizations; agricultural lands devastated by the lack of rainfall; rural populations displaced to the outskirts of metropolises now subject to extreme heat waves, coupled with sandstorms, pollution and all the health risks they entail.This is the grim picture of the climate in the Middle East, which is warming almost twice as quickly as the global average, according to a new study published in September by Reviews of Geophysics.Many of the region’s roughly 400 million people are being made more vulnerable as the warming continues. For them, climate change is just an additional challenge in a long list of scourges that often relegate it to the background.However, in the Middle East and the broader Mediterranean region, the term “climate emergency” is an...
Dried-up, polluted rivers in regions once referred to as cradles of millennia-old civilizations; agricultural lands devastated by the lack of rainfall; rural populations displaced to the outskirts of metropolises now subject to extreme heat waves, coupled with sandstorms, pollution and all the health risks they entail.This is the grim picture of the climate in the Middle East, which is warming almost twice as quickly as the global average, according to a new study published in September by Reviews of Geophysics.Many of the region’s roughly 400 million people are being made more vulnerable as the warming continues. For them, climate change is just an additional challenge in a long list of scourges that often relegate it to the background.However, in the Middle East and the broader Mediterranean region, the term “climate emergency”...