High and dry

The Middle East is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, but oil spoils keep its regimes in power. Can the Gulf states find a way to transition away from fossil-fuel exports and thus avoid their own self-destruction?

- Patrick Wintour

Northern Oman has just been battered by Cyclone Shaheen , the first tropical cyclone to make it that far west into the Gulf. Around Basra in southern Iraq this summer, pressure on the grid owing to 50C heat led to constant blackouts, with residents driving around in their cars to stay cool.

Kuwait broke the record for the hottest day ever at 53.6C in 2016, and its 10-day rolling average this summer was equally sweltering. Flash floods occurred in Jeddah and, more recently, in Mecca, while across Saudi Arabia average temperatures have increased by 2%, and the maximum temperatures by 2.5%, all since the 1980s.

In Tehran, air pollution kills 4,000 people each year while, in Iran’s southwest province of Khuzestan , citizens blocked roads and burned tyres to protest against droughts caused by a combination of mismanagement, western sanctions and killer heat. In the United Arab Emirates it is estimated that the climate crisis costs $8.2bn a year in higher health costs.

And it is, of course, going to get much worse, as temperatures, humidity and waters rise. The Middle East is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world. By the end of the century, if more dire predictions prove true, Mecca may not be habitable, making the summer Haj a pilgrimage of peril . Large tracts of the Middle East will resemble the desert in Ethiopia’s Afar , a vast expanse with no permanent human settlement pressed against the Red Sea . The gleaming Gulf coastal cities by the end of the century could find themselves inundated as waters rise. It is not quite Apocalypse Now, but Apocalypse Foreseeably Soon.