CAIRO (AFP) – Little rainfall, aggressive heatwaves and worsening drought make the Middle East the most water-stressed region in the world, with climate change threatening to displace millions of people.
Hussein Abu Saddam, head of the farmers’ syndicate in Egypt which is hosting the COP27 global climate summit in November, told AFP he is already witness to a climate-induced exodus from the countryside.
Agriculture in Egypt -- “one of the most arid countries in the world” -- has grown even less profitable because of new climate-linked hazards such as “the appearance of new parasites”, he said.
“Young people from rural areas are migrating abroad or to big cities to work in industry.”
According to the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), “roughly 90 percent of refugees come from countries that are the most vulnerable and least ready to adapt to the impacts of climate change”.
“If people can’t farm, if people can’t work, if people can’t find food, they have few alternatives to displacement,” Amy Pope, deputy director of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), told AFP.
In 2021, natural disasters forced “nearly three million people” to leave their homes in Africa and the Middle East, she said.
“And the situation is only going to get worse.”
By 2060, Egypt’s already stretched agricultural sector could shrink by as much as 47 percent, researchers predict.
In addition to “the decline in agricultural production”, rural-urban migration is also fed by “the attractiveness of urban life, the city and services that are available there”, according to Florian Bonnefoi, a research fellow at the Centre for Economic, Legal and Social Study and Documentation (CEDEJ) in Cairo.
Globally, the World Bank estimates that by 2050, if nothing is done to prevent it, there will be 216 million people internally displaced by climate change, including 19.3 million in North Africa.
Some seven percent of people in North Africa -- where densely populated coastlines are among the world’s most threatened by rising waters -- live less than five meters above sea level, according to the European Institute of the Mediterranean (IEMed).
As coastlines are affected, populations will naturally converge on big cities: Cairo, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, the Casablanca-Rabat area and Tangier.
But these “hotbeds of climate migration”, the World Bank warns, are themselves vulnerable to rising waters.
In the Egyptian city of Alexandria, for example, two million people -- nearly a third of its inhabitants -- could be displaced and 214,000 jobs lost if the sea level rises by half a meter.