Imagine a summer afternoon in a Gulf city. One person moves from an air-conditioned flat to an air-conditioned car and office. Another maintains the landscaping between those buildings, with hours of physical work still ahead.
They share a forecast. They do not share the same heat exposure, or the same ability to escape it.
That is the problem a regional temperature average cannot show. It is also the problem missing from too many conversations that begin with alarming climate data and end with an exciting investment pipeline.
The alarm is justified. On 4 December 2025, the World Meteorological Organization released its inaugural State of the Climate in the Arab Region 2024. Its headline: the region is warming at roughly twice the global average rate.
But the most useful question is not simply how fast the thermometer is moving. It is what protection actually reaches people, what that protection depends on, and who remains outside it.
First, get “twice as fast” right
The WMO report gives a regional warming trend of about 0.43°C per decade for 1991–2024, compared with approximately 0.2°C per decade for the global land–ocean average. The warning is real. The denominator matters.
Land has generally warmed faster than the ocean, as the IPCC explains. A comparison with the whole planet is useful, but it does not mean this region is warming twice as fast as every other land region.
Nor are “Arab region” and “MENA” interchangeable geographical units. WMO covers 22 Arab countries, including countries in East Africa and the Comoros. Other definitions of MENA include countries outside that group.
The other much-quoted number, 1.08°C, is different: it is the region’s 2024 annual temperature anomaly above the 1991–2020 average. It is not the warming rate and cannot be compared directly with the Paris Agreement’s global, long-term warming limits relative to pre-industrial conditions. A record year does not, by itself, establish a tipping point.
These distinctions do not soften the story. They keep an important warning from becoming a muddle of incompatible numbers.
A dry region can still flood
The tempting version of the story divides the region into a drought-stricken Maghreb and a flooded Gulf. Reality is less tidy.
WMO describes 2024 as Morocco’s sixth consecutive dry year, alongside severe drought elsewhere in north-western Africa. Yet Morocco and Algeria also experienced deadly flash floods that September. A prolonged water shortage and a destructive downpour can occur in the same place.
There is another detail worth reading past the headlines for. The report’s drought section does not find statistically significant changes in drought intensity across its broad subregions over 1991–2024. That result concerns a precipitation-based index. It does not measure the full water balance, including evaporative demand and water extraction; nor does it rule out local changes or a climate contribution to a particular drought.
The lesson is not that the drought is unimportant. It is that six dry years are not, on their own, a diagnosis of an irreversible regional regime shift.
The April 2024 UAE and Oman floods demand similar care. World Weather Attribution and a subsequent peer-reviewed analysis used different event definitions and methods, with substantial uncertainty. The later study found evidence of increased likelihood, but the magnitude, and especially the change in intensity, remain uncertain.
What is much less controversial is that rainfall becomes a disaster through its interaction with settlements, roads, drainage and people. The right engineering question is not whether a desert “should” receive that much rain. It is what happens when it does.
Fifty degrees is not a workplace safety standard
“Above 50°C” is a compelling headline. It is not the boundary between safe and unsafe work.
Heat strain also depends on humidity, direct sunlight, wind, clothing, workload and recovery. A weather-station temperature does not describe the heat load of someone carrying materials in the sun.
A study of occupational injuries in Kuwait during 2015–2019 found higher injury risk with hotter conditions during the summer period when a midday-work ban already applied. This was observational research, not a controlled before-and-after evaluation. It does not prove that the ban achieved nothing. It does show why the presence of a rule is not evidence of sufficient protection.
There are more responsive policy designs. Qatar’s 2021 heat-stress rules included a workplace wet-bulb globe temperature stop-work trigger and a right for workers to remove themselves from dangerous heat. This heat index accounts for more than ordinary air temperature, including humidity and radiant heat.
Those are policy provisions, not proof of compliance or improved health outcomes. But they point towards a better question: can the person exposed to the heat actually stop, rest and recover without being penalised?
Cooling is only as reliable as its dependencies
Air conditioning is not the villain of this story. In dangerous heat, access to effective cooling can be essential. The mistake is treating an installed unit as a completed adaptation.
Consider Iraq, rather than assuming the entire Arab region resembles a wealthy Gulf development. The IEA’s 2025 climate-resilience assessment describes an electricity system damaged by decades of conflict, struggling to meet summer demand and supplemented by costly neighbourhood generators. It documents a June 2022 grid failure during extreme heat that left millions without electricity in southern governorates.
That is a dependency problem: hotter conditions increase the need for cooling while also making reliable electricity supply harder.
Counting air conditioners cannot tell us whether a household can afford to run one, whether it works during a peak-demand outage, or whether someone living in a poorly insulated room can remain safe overnight.
A resilience investment should therefore be evaluated as a service maintained under stress, not just an asset installed. Cooling, electricity, building design and access belong in the same conversation.
Greener is not automatically cooler, or more resilient
Urban greening deserves a place in that conversation. The IPCC identifies urban greening and other ecosystem-based measures as effective adaptation options in appropriate contexts. Shade, vegetation and better-designed public space can deliver real benefits.
But a planting total is not a heat-health outcome. In a water-limited city, the questions include where the shade falls, who uses it, what survives, and how water is supplied.
A 2024 modelling study of Riyadh illustrates why design details matter. Its irrigated tree scenarios provided cooling, while some non-irrigated, low-growing vegetation scenarios did not cool peak-hour air temperatures. The scenarios changed vegetation type as well as irrigation, so this is not a clean experiment isolating the effect of water. It is also a city-scale simulation of air temperature, not a direct measurement of pedestrian thermal comfort.
The useful conclusion is not “trees fail in deserts”. It is do not purchase a promised cooling benefit without examining the assumptions that produce it.
Compare tree canopy, built shade, cool roofs and their combinations. Include irrigation sources, maintenance and biodiversity in the accounting. As this blog’s earlier discussion of Middle Eastern greening argues, a planting decision can have consequences beyond the project boundary and handover date.
A warning is not yet protection
The WMO report offers an apparently reassuring statistic: nearly 60% of Arab countries have multi-hazard early warning systems.
Read the date and denominator. Its underlying statement is that 59% of countries reported having systems as of March 2024. It is not the percentage of people protected. A separate 2025 global assessment puts worldwide reported system existence at 60%, so the older comparison with a 55% global average should not be presented as current.
Progress is real. The assessment also reports greater pre-emptive evacuation in the Arab States. But it stresses that systems need functioning components, sustained maintenance and locally usable communication.
A warning can arrive on time and still fail to protect someone who has no transport, no safe destination, no affordable cooling or no authority to stop work. Forecast quality and the ability to act are different parts of the same system.
Replace the investment scoreboard with a protection ledger
There is a legitimate business case for adaptation. There is also a public obligation to protect people who are not profitable customers.
The IPCC finds adaptation finance insufficient; demanding evidence of benefit is not an argument for spending less. It is an argument for funding useful protection, including operations, maintenance and social safeguards after the announcement photographs are taken.
For planners, clients and consultants, a better ledger might look like this:
| Instead of stopping at… | Track protection and its conditions |
|---|---|
| Cooling capacity installed | Indoor heat exposure, affordability and cooling availability during outages |
| Trees planted | Surviving, useful shade where people need it, alongside water use and ecological effects |
| A heat policy published | Measured workplace conditions, rest access, enforcement and injury surveillance |
| A warning system reported | Who received and understood warnings, who could act, and what happened next |
| Drainage infrastructure completed | Service continuity and flood impacts, evaluated against event severity and changing exposure |
This is a proposed evaluation framework, not a claim that these indicators prove causality or transfer unchanged to every city. Outcomes need a fair comparison: a more severe storm, a hotter summer or newly exposed development can change losses even when an intervention helps.
Sometimes the answer will be a better pump, building or forecast. Sometimes it will be a different work schedule, a protected right to rest, or a decision not to put new development in a hazardous location.
And none of this makes emissions reduction optional. Adaptation has limits; reducing warming reduces the load that every protective system must carry.
The WMO’s warming rate tells us how quickly conditions are changing. It cannot tell us who has the power to escape them.
Air conditioning can protect a room. Resilience has to reach the person still outside.
Sources and further reading
- WMO, ESCWA & League of Arab States (2025). State of the Climate in the Arab Region 2024.
- WMO (2025). Temperature increase is accelerating in Arab Region, with escalating impacts.
- IPCC (2023). Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report, Summary for Policymakers.
- Alahmad et al. (2023). Extreme heat and work injuries in Kuwait’s hot summers.
- Qatar Ministry of Administrative Development, Labour & Social Affairs (2021). Ministerial Decision No. 17 of 2021: precautions to protect workers from heat stress.
- IEA (2025). National Climate Resilience Assessment for Iraq.
- Zachariah et al. / World Weather Attribution (2024). Heavy precipitation hitting vulnerable communities in the UAE and Oman becoming an increasing threat as the climate warms.
- Francis et al. (2025). From cause to consequence: examining the historic April 2024 rainstorm in the United Arab Emirates through the lens of climate change.
- Gao et al. (2024). The use of green infrastructure and irrigation in the mitigation of urban heat in a desert city.
- UNDRR & WMO (2025). Early warning systems reach new heights, but critical gaps jeopardize global progress.
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