Exposed Population to Temperature Extremes in MENA in the Context of Paris Climate Agreement Temperature Goals

This study aims to project extreme temperatures and the population exposed to them in the MENA region for two Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP1-1.9 and 1-2.6), representative Paris climate agreement goals of 1.5°C and 2.0°C temperature rise limits, respectively, for two future periods, near (2020–2059) and far (2060–2099). The daily maximum (T_max) and minimum (T_min) temperature of global climate models (GCMs) of the coupled model intercomparison project phase 6 (CMIP6) were used to estimate eight temperature indices, while the population distribution for the historical and future periods was used to assess the changes in the population exposed to temperature extremes. Eastern regions faced the highest increase of warm spells, up to 100 days more in SSP1-2.6, while cold spells decreased the most in Egypt and Sudan by up to 24 days in the same scenario. The southern region faced the highest increase in summer days, with population exposure up to 25 million person-day by 2099. The extremes in temperature would mainly affect the populations of Mauritania, Algeria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, UAE, and Qatar. For a temperature rise of 2.0°C, the percentage of the population exposed to the extremes expressed by duration will increase by between 2.7% and 18.5% by 2059 and by between 8.9% and 77.8% by 2099, indicating a significant increase in the population exposed to the hot extreme for only 0.5°C rising temperature. However, the changes will be more remarkable for the cold and hot extremes.