Middle East: How Extreme Heat Will Harm Human Rights In The Region

-Analysis-

BEIRUT — Climate change is no longer a question for the elite. It has become an inevitable issue in the Middle East and North Africa that must be discussed with the same importance as armed conflicts. The region has been hit by high temperatures — that have exceeded 60 °C in Kuwait, 54 °C in Egypt, and 50 °C in Saudi Arabia — and caused many deaths. Some areas in the region could one day be unlivable due to rising temperatures.

This summer, seven Arab countries recorded record high temperatures. The world experienced the hottest June on record and the 13th month in a row to set a temperature record, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

“We do not know where we are going, and we may end up with destruction,” said Mohammed-Said Karrouk, climatology professor at the Hassan II University in Casablanca, Morocco. He explained that the Middle East has different climatic characteristics and its temperatures are always high, as the region “suffers from a defect in the environmental systems, technical infrastructure, and management.”

200 days of extreme heat

Temperatures in some areas of the region are expected to reach 60 °C by 2060. And residents of the Middle East can expect 200 days of extreme heat annually, said Johannes Lelieveld, a Dutch atmospheric chemist at the scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, adding that “only those who have the ability to operate air conditioners will survive.”

High temperatures lead to environmental injustice. They will affect all people living in the Arab region, especially vulnerable groups, including refugees, displaced people, and residents of areas suffering from a total or semi-permanent power outages such as Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Gaza. Many of these people lack decent housing, and live in nylon tents that trap the sun’s heat.

“We are facing huge and unknown scenarios.”

High temperatures affect economic and social rights, such as the human right to life, health, water and food. Heat-related deaths in the Middle East and North Africa are expected to increase in the next two decades from two deaths per 10,000 people currently, to 123 per 10,000 people, according to health journal The Lancet.

Extreme heat causes the greatest mortality rate of all extreme weather, with an estimated 489,000 heat-related deaths per year between 2000 and 2019, according to a 2023 report by the World Meteorological Organization.

Rising temperature has already caused forced displacement in multiple areas in the Middle East, especially Iraq which recorded one of the world’s highest temperatures this year, and has become a source of environmental migrants. Many Iraqis were forced to move to other countries including Iran, Turkey and Europe. Some in central and southern Iraq also moved to other areas inside the country.

Karrouk said governments in the region must implement programs to protect their populations from the effects of climate change. “We are facing huge and unknown scenarios, and each country must act according to its own data to prepare the infrastructure and respond to natural changes,” Karrouk said.

​Hajj deaths were an example

The UN Human Rights Council has said that climate change “represents an immediate and widespread threat to people and communities around the world.” High temperatures affect civil and political rights, such as the right to freedom of religion and belief. They could, for example, make the annual Muslim Hajj pilgrimage impossible in the coming years.

This year during the Hajj, an unprecedented heat wave cause temperatures to exceed 50 °C in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Islam’s holiest site. The heatwave caused the deaths of more than 1,300 pilgrims.

A 2019 study by experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that even if the world succeeds in mitigating the worst effects of climate change, the the Hajj, whose timing varies, would again take place in the hottest summer months, which will be from 2047 to 2052 and from 2079 to 2086.