1.Recent observations of climatic trends in the Middle East and North Africa over the last decades indicate rising near-surface temperatures and falling precipitation, especially in winter months. As Barkhordian reported, between 1980 and 2009, mean annual and seasonal near-surface temperatures in North Africa increased at a statistically significant rate.
2 Most important are significant increases in annual minimum and maximum temperature, also during the same period.
3 These temperature increases were noted to be accompanied by lowered levels of winter precipitation, particularly north of the Atlas, along the coasts of Algeria and Tunisia. Furthermore, there was evidence of a tendency towards slightly wetter conditions in late summer and fall in northern Morocco and Algeria.
4 The general trends of temperature and of precipitation observed in North Africa are comparable to those of the other Mediterranean basin. A NOAA study conducted in 2011 on the Mediterranean basin at large reported clear evidences of a trend towards a drier climate that first became apparent in the 1970s. This was accompanied by the most severe drying in the countries of the Levant, that is, Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
5 A significant trend towards warmer and drier conditions was confirmed by a more recent study using daily observational weather station data from across the entire Arab region.
6 In the Arabian Peninsula, the downward trend in precipitation is not considered statistically significant during the interval of 1980 to 2008; however, observations of warmer temperatures during the same period were found to be significant. The strongest evidence came in the form of increasing trends in annual minimum temperature. Sixteen of the twenty-one observation stations in the Arabian Peninsula showed statistically significant warming trends, with most rapid annual increases being detected in the UAE, northwest Oman, and Qatar.
7 The Middle East and North Africa are thus likely to see a continuing trend over the next ten years towards longer summers and shorter winters, with a globally significant rate of warming.
8. Scarcity and the Security Of Middle Eastern and North African States.
The Syrian case provides valuable lessons and insights to those interested in the extent to which increasing water stress and changing climatic patterns impact domestic as well as external security dynamics in the Middle Eastern and North African nations.
9 First, Syria depends heavily on both surface and groundwater resources, and there are lessons here applicable to other MENA countries such as Morocco, Algeria,
10 Egypt, Iraq, and Lebanon. The other MENA nations that depend mainly on groundwater are Tunisia, Libya, Jordan, Palestine, and Yemen, while the Persian Gulf oil exporting nations strongly rely on desalinated seawater as a supplement to groundwater use. These can be considered in a separate post because they stand as an exception to the other trends in regional water availability.
Secondly, climate change is expected to have many of the same effects on Syria as similar parts of the Middle East and North Africa, including rising surface temperatures, declining precipitation levels, and increased unpredictability of precipitation events.
Thirdly, it was in 2011 that Syria witnessed extensive civil unrest triggered by a crippling, multi-year drought spanning from 2006-2010, which displaced upwards of a million people and devastated entire communities in the eastern and northeastern parts of the country.
Launching as a change action, initially peaceful protests were responded to violently by the authoritarian regime of Bashar al-Assad, which evolved armed resistance to the regime and ultimately snowballed into the current civil war in Syria. Given these factors, Syria makes for a good case study that links water scarcity to civil unrest/conflict in the Middle East and North Africa.
the climate changes is a very problems in the world.