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. Every national adaptation plan in the region is, at its core, a water plan.

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.¹⁶⁸

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 western and central Asia warmed 0.27 to 0.47 °C a decade between 1960 and 2013.² The seas warm with the land: up to about 0.7 °C a decade on the western side of the Arabian Gulf, 0.17 °C a decade in the Red Sea as a whole and 0.40 to 0.45 °C a decade in its north.¹⁵¹⁶ 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.¹⁷

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.⁹ By the time the same team assessed five years of it, the factor was about 50, and the mechanism was plain: the rainfall signal is weak, the heat signal is strong, so evaporative demand carries 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.¹⁰ 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.¹⁰

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.¹⁸

• Warming about 20% above the global mean in Mediterranean projections, and close to twice it in the eastern Mediterranean's observed record
• Drier means and wilder extremes: less snow, earlier melt, harder rain
• Evaporative demand up: the same crops need more water per season
• Sea-level rise salinising the Nile Delta and coastal aquifers
• Compound events: drought, heat and dust together, the pattern since 2020

The region, country by country

Every country on this platform, ranked by how fast it has warmed since 1971.

Source: World Bank Climate Change Knowledge Portal, retrieved September 2026. Rainfall and the warming trend come from the ERA5 0.25° reanalysis; the projections are the CMIP6 0.25° multi-model ensemble median for 2080–2099 under SSP5-8.5, as change against 1995–2014. National averages hide large internal gradients, and reanalysis rainfall over deserts carries wide uncertainty.

Projections point the same way, 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: 90 to 120 mm a year less in coastal areas by the end of the century, concentrated around the Atlas Mountains and the upper Euphrates and Tigris.¹⁴ For the Arabian Peninsula, 30 CMIP6 models give warming of 1.6 °C under the lowest scenario to 5.3 °C under the highest by 2070 to 2099, against 1981 to 2010.² 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.²

Heat is the firmer forecast. Extreme temperatures in the MENA regions could rise by almost 7 °C by 2100 under the highest emissions pathway.³ 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 2100.⁷ Water systems feel that twice over, in demand and in evaporation.

One scheme in this sector, examined in full: what was built, what it cost, what worked and what did not.

Adaptation in water terms means four moves, and the region is making all of them. Each has a record now, and the records are uneven.

Diversify supply, which works and is expensive

Desalination and reuse are climate-proof by construction, which is why every drought in the region ends in a procurement. Morocco is the clearest case: after seven drought years it accelerated plants at Agadir, Jorf Lasfar, Casablanca, Dakhla and Nador.²³

The cost has to be carried permanently. Desalinated irrigation water at Chtouka costs 13 dirhams a cubic metre to produce and sells at 5.50 to 6, and the Agadir operating subsidy alone ran to 684 million dirhams between January 2022 and June 2024.²⁷²⁶ Diversification is insurance, and insurance has a premium.

Store more, and understand what storage is worth

Aquifer recharge in Oman and the UAE, re-operated dams in Morocco, and banked desalinated water in Abu Dhabi’s Liwa reserve.

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.¹⁹ In a warming basin the gross number flatters.

Squeeze demand, which is the move most often skipped

Drip conversion, non-revenue water programmes and tariffs. It is the cheapest of the four and the least funded.

Morocco allocates 50 million dirhams to communication and behavioural change out of 142,695 million in its national water programme, which is 0.035%.²⁶ The World Bank had already warned that without demand management the 2050 gap will not close even if every planned investment is delivered.²⁸ And efficiency alone is not demand management: 794,000 hectares of drip did not stabilise Moroccan irrigation demand.²⁵

Plan for the tail, because the tail is what arrives

Drought codes and flood early warning, which is the thinnest of the four records.

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.¹² 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.¹⁹

Who pays for 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 added US$1.25 billion of guarantees in December 2025; the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank approved US$250 million in March 2026 alongside DFC, EBRD, EIB, IFC and Proparco.²⁰²¹²²

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.²²

Reference points across the region:

Morocco (dam storage vs record 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).

Sources for these files: Kelley et al. (2015) on the Syrian drought¹³; World Weather Attribution and Armon et al. (2025) on Derna, which disagree on the rainfall’s return period¹¹¹²; Moroccan reporting on the February 2026 recovery.²³²⁴

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

National adaptation plans as listed on the UNFCCC NAP register, updated 10 August 2026; finance dates from each institution's own project record.

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.²⁰ MIGA records Jordanian water demand exceeding available resources by 26%, and solar covering about 28% of the project’s electricity.²¹ The capital structure is 85% debt and 15% equity.²² 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.¹⁰

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.⁶ 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 across Iran the land itself is measurably sinking with them.¹

The adaptation response is converging on three moves: manufacture more water through desalination and reuse, lose less of it through network efficiency and drip irrigation, and manage demand through pricing and allocation reform. Climate finance increasingly rewards the first two, especially where they cut carbon as well as risk.

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 countries furthest down that road, the Gulf, Israel and increasingly Morocco and Jordan, are the region’s de facto adaptation laboratories.

The cost of not doing it has been quantified. The IPCC cites work putting water-related climate damage at 14% of Middle Eastern GDP by 2050 without adaptation, against 0.49% globally.⁴ Soil moisture drought in the Mediterranean is projected to lengthen by 46% at 1.5 °C of warming and by 346% at 3 to 4 °C.³ In northern Africa, surface water availability falls by 5 to 40% in 2030 to 2065 and by 7 to 55% later in the century, 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.⁵

Standing references for this sector. Every one is a real work and every link was checked.

• 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 Water Risk Atlas. Sub-basin stress, depletion and drought-risk layers, and the source of the stress grades used here. wri.org
• Green Climate Fund, the largest dedicated adaptation financier active in the region, and its project record. greenclimate.fund