Climate, Drought & Flood Risk

Climate change reaches this region through water first. The reservoir that does not refill, the season that arrives early, the storm that lands on a city built for a drier century.

The Mediterranean is already 1.5 °C above its pre-industrial temperature, and its sea surface has warmed by 0.29 to 0.44 °C a decade since the early 1980s, faster in the eastern basin.¹ How much faster the region warms than the world depends on what is being measured, and the honest answer is a range. The IPCC projects Mediterranean warming at rates about 20% above global means; the observed record for the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East runs at about 0.45 °C a decade, which the authors of that work describe as close to twice the global rate.^1 2 3

The water consequence is the same either way. The IPCC expects climate change to cut river low flows and annual runoff across the Mediterranean by 5 to 70%, and to reduce hydropower capacity with it.¹ Heat of this order does more than raise demand. It takes water out of reservoirs and soil through evaporation before anyone has used it.

The observed record already shows the direction. The Arabian Peninsula is among the regions that warmed fastest after 1980, at 0.3 to 0.5 °C a decade, while the IPCC’s West Central Asia region warmed 0.27 to 0.47 °C a decade between 1960 and 2013.⁴ The seas warm with the land: sea surface temperatures rose by up to about 0.7 °C a decade on the western side of the Gulf,⁵ and the Red Sea’s annual maximum surface temperature rose 0.17 °C a decade over 1982 to 2015, and 0.40 to 0.45 °C a decade in its north.⁶ Mediterranean sea level rose 2.8 mm a year over 1993 to 2018, against 1.4 mm a year across the twentieth century.¹ The regional heat record stands at 53.9 °C, measured at Mitribah in Kuwait in July 2016 and confirmed by a WMO evaluation.⁷

Drought is where the signal is clearest. Attribution analysis of the drought running from 2020 found it 25 times more likely across the Euphrates and Tigris basin, and 16 times more likely over Iran, than in a climate 1.2 °C cooler.⁸ By the time the same team assessed five years of it, against a climate 1.3 °C cooler, the factor was about 50 over Iran and about 30 in the Euphrates and Tigris basin, and the mechanism was plain: the rainfall signal was weak, the heat signal was strong, so evaporative demand carried the attribution. Without human-caused warming that combination of rain and temperature would not be classified as a drought at all, and an event of this severity would have been expected only two or three times a century.⁹ The consequences were counted the same year. Iraq recorded its driest year since 1933, with Tigris and Euphrates levels down by up to 27%, while Syrian rainfall fell by nearly 70% and left a wheat shortfall of 2.73 million tonnes.⁹

The flood end of the distribution is moving too. On 16 April 2024 the United Arab Emirates recorded 254.8 mm of rain in 24 hours at Khatm al-Shakla near Al Ain, against a national average of about 100 mm for a whole year, in what the national meteorology centre called the heaviest rainfall in at least 75 years.¹⁰

• Warming about 20% above the global mean in Mediterranean projections, and close to twice it in the eastern Mediterranean's observed record
• Drier means around the Mediterranean, less snow and earlier melt in the West Central Asian mountains, harder rain
• Evaporative demand up: the same crops need more water per season
• Sea-level rise and land subsidence raising salinisation risk in the Nile Delta and coastal aquifers
• Compound events: drought, heat and dust together, as in Iran and the Tigris-Euphrates basin since 2020

The region, country by country

Every country on this platform, ranked by how fast it has warmed since 1971. Rain is the 1991–2020 average and warming the trend since 1971; the last two columns are the projected change by 2080–2099.

Projections agree on heat and diverge on rain, with different degrees of confidence. The IPCC expects Mediterranean precipitation to fall by about 4% for every 1 °C of global warming, and by about 12% at 3 °C, with river runoff and low flows down 12 to 15% or more in most places.¹ The regional assessment for the Arab region gives the decline in millimetres instead: reductions reaching 90 to 120 mm a year in coastal areas by the end of the century under both RCP4.5 and RCP8.5, concentrated around the Atlas Mountains and the upper Euphrates and Tigris.¹¹ For the Arabian Peninsula, 30 CMIP6 models give warming of 1.6 °C under SSP1-2.6 to 5.3 °C under SSP5-8.5 by 2070 to 2099, against 1981 to 2010, and more rain rather than less: 3.8% more under SSP1-2.6 and 31.8% more under SSP5-8.5 by 2080 to 2100, against 1995 to 2014.⁴ Rainfall projections for South West Asia, the IPCC notes, carry large uncertainties and therefore low confidence, which is worth remembering whenever a single regional percentage is quoted.⁴

Heat is the firmer forecast. Extreme temperatures over the Arabian Peninsula and West Central Asia could rise by almost 7 °C by 2100 under the high-emissions RCP8.5 pathway.¹² On a business-as-usual path, unprecedented super- and ultra-extreme heatwave conditions emerge in the second half of the century, reaching 56 °C and above, with about half the region’s population, some 600 million people, exposed by 2100.¹³ Water systems feel that twice over, in demand and in evaporation.

One case in this sector, examined in full.

Adaptation in water terms means four moves. Each has a record now, and the records are uneven.

Diversify supply, which works and is expensive

Desalination and reuse do not depend on rainfall, which makes them the obvious response to drought. Morocco is a case in point: during its drought years it pushed ahead with plants at Agadir, Jorf Lasfar, Casablanca, Dakhla and Nador.^14 15

The cost has to be carried permanently. Desalinated irrigation water at Chtouka costs 13 dirhams a cubic metre at the farm hydrant and sells at 5.50 to 6.^16 17 Drinking water from Agadir is subsidised too: the state’s operating compensation to ONEE, covering the gap between the private partner’s price and the tariff charged to the regional distributor, reached 684 million dirhams between January 2022 and June 2024.¹⁷ Diversification is insurance, and insurance has a premium.

Store more, and understand what storage is worth

Aquifer recharge in Oman and the UAE, and desalinated seawater stored in Abu Dhabi’s Liwa reserve.^18 19

Iraq is the caution. Its live storage rose from about 3.5 to 20 billion cubic metres over the 2025 to 2026 winter, and the United Nations still called that barely a quarter of what has been lost since 2020, and less than a fifth of the system’s capacity. The same brief warned that above-normal temperatures mean storage figures overstate the net hydrological gain.²⁰ In a warming basin the gross number flatters.

Squeeze demand, where behaviour change gets least

Drip conversion, non-revenue water programmes and tariffs. Morocco’s national programme funds the engineering side: cutting drinking-water losses and modernising irrigation take 19% of its budget.²¹

The behavioural side gets almost nothing: 50 million dirhams for communication and behavioural change out of 142,694.6 million, or 0.035%.²¹ The World Bank had already warned that without demand management policies the 2050 gap would likely not close even if every investment in the National Water Plan were delivered.²² And efficiency alone is not demand management: about 794,000 hectares equipped with localised irrigation did not stabilise Moroccan irrigation demand.²³

Plan for the tail, because the tail is what arrives

Drought codes and flood early warning.

Derna in September 2023 is the reference: two unmaintained 1970s dams failed during Storm Daniel and the engineering post-mortem judged the disaster foreseeable, finding that the failures amplified the damage nearly twentyfold against a dam-free scenario.²⁴ Even Iraq’s good winter did harm, killing two people in Sulaymaniyah in December 2025 and inundating 300 tents at the Bizibez camp in Anbar.²⁰

Funding adaptation

Jordan’s Aqaba to Amman carrier is the region’s flagship adaptation investment, and its finance stack shows what climate-justified water infrastructure now costs to assemble. The Green Climate Fund approved US$295 million on 30 October 2025 towards a US$6.3 billion scheme; MIGA lists up to US$1.25 billion of guarantees as proposed, with an estimated board date of December 2025; the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank approved US$250 million in March 2026 alongside DFC, EBRD, EIB, IFC and Proparco.^25 26 27

Adaptation finance is also slow. The project took its concept decision in June 2025 and expects its last disbursement in late 2030, which is the realistic timescale at this scale.²⁷

Reference points across the region:

Morocco (dam storage vs a seven-year drought), Syria (the 2007–10 drought's long shadow), Iraq and Iran (compound drought-heat crises), Jordan (adaptation finance in action), Egypt (delta salinisation frontier).

The instruments that carry adaptation money and rules, with the dates they actually exist from:

The Jordanian scheme shows what the money buys and on what terms. The desalination plant is designed for 300 million m³ a year, about 40% of municipal demand by 2030 and 45% by 2040, with roughly 281 MWp of solar generation and 14 million people credited with increased resilience.²⁵ MIGA expects Jordanian water demand in 2025 to exceed available resources by 26%, and solar to cover about 28% of the project’s electricity.²⁶ The capital structure is 85% debt and 15% equity.²⁷ Outside the flagships, policy moves more quietly: Iran adopted a national climate change management plan in October 2025 aimed at resilience in water and agriculture.⁹

The bodies that commission, regulate or deliver in this sector, and the names that recur across its tenders.

• Green Climate Fund (GCF)Fund · Regional
• World BankDevelopment bank · Regional
• European Bank for Reconstruction & Development (EBRD)Development bank · Regional
• UN-ESCWARegional body · Regional

Mandates, procurement routes and the rest of the region’s institutions are in the decision-maker directory.

The Middle East is warming faster than the global average, and its water system is feeling it first.² Higher temperatures raise evaporation and crop water demand at the same time as rainfall becomes more erratic, more intense when it comes and absent for longer between. The result is a squeeze on every conventional resource: rivers, aquifers and reservoirs alike.

For surface water, the story is one of variability: flash floods deliver water too fast to capture while multi-year droughts draw down storage. For groundwater, warming accelerates a crisis that is already well advanced. As recharge falls and pumping rises, water tables drop, and in Iran about 3.5% of the country, some 56,000 km², is subsiding, mainly where aquifers are pumped for irrigation.³⁴

The adaptation response comes down to the four moves set out above: manufacture more water through desalination and reuse, store more of it, lose less and use less through network efficiency, drip irrigation, pricing and allocation reform, and plan for the extremes.

The planning assumption for the decade ahead is that the climate, not just population growth, sets the pace of water stress, and that resilience is bought through infrastructure, efficiency and cooperation rather than found.

Plan for a region that is hotter, thirstier and flashier. The system answer stays the same: supplies that do not depend on rain, networks that do not waste, storage that smooths the new variance, and institutions that act before the reservoir is empty.

The cost of not doing it has been quantified. The IPCC cites work projecting water-related impacts of climate change to reduce Middle Eastern GDP by 14% by 2050 under SSP3 without adaptation, compared with 0.49% globally.³⁵ At today’s 1 °C of global warming, Mediterranean soil-moisture drought is projected to last 46% longer than in the late twentieth century, rising to 107% longer at 1.5 °C and 346% at 3 °C.¹² In northern Africa, surface water availability is projected to fall by 5 to 40% in 2030 to 2065 and by 7 to 55% in 2066 to 2095, against 1976 to 2005, with runoff in Morocco and Tunisia down 10 to 63% by mid-century.¹ Dust is the quieter tail risk: the Tigris and Euphrates alluvial plain is one of the world’s most important dust sources, and Iranian dust events show a rising trend.³⁶

Standing references for this sector.

• IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group II. Chapter 4 covers water, and the regional chapters carry the Middle East and North Africa projections. ipcc.ch
• World Resources Institute, Aqueduct 4.0 Current and Future Country Rankings (16 August 2023), indicator baseline water stress (bws), all sectors, 1979–2019. The source of the country water-stress categories used on this site (Low to Extremely high). Palestine has no value in it; the site shows our area-weighted calculation from the Aqueduct 4.0 sub-basin scores there instead, which is not Aqueduct’s demand-weighted method. The Aqueduct 4.0 Water Risk Atlas also supplies the sub-basin stress, depletion and drought-risk layers on the maps. wri.org
• Green Climate Fund, the world’s largest dedicated climate fund and the largest provider of adaptation finance among climate funds, and its project record. greenclimate.fund