In the summer of 2022, flash flooding due to heavy monsoon
rains in Pakistan, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and southeast Iran killed over
1,000 people. In this part of the world, the extreme shifts in weather between
monsoon and dry season dictate subsistence cycles and financial livelihood,
with accompanying risks to life and property. Shifting global
precipitation patterns due to climate change, however, are altering the timing
and magnitude of these events.
In the Middle East and North Africa region, the Arabian Sea
plays a major part in both South Asian and African monsoons, providing a source
of moisture. Temperature and vapor pressure in the northern Arabian Sea have
been steadily increasing since the 1980s and regional sea surface
temperatures have seen a steady rise since 2003. Combined, these phenomena
are a recipe for disaster.
The warmer average air mass above the sea has an increased
capacity to hold water and will take longer to saturate as a result. This
lengthens the average time between precipitation events, but is also more
likely to produce catastrophically high precipitation when it does.
What can be done to adapt to this new reality? Can
infrastructure be adapted, optimized, or possibly even re-imagined to take
advantage of such events?
Infrastructure for the capture, transport, and treatment of
surface water will need to adapt to the new realities of climate change, in
MENA perhaps quicker than anywhere else. Correlation between historically
extreme events and the “new normal” could serve to guide the retrofitting of
pre-existing infrastructure as well as updated requirements for the
construction of new infrastructure. This should be based on sound statistics
and up-to-date flood frequency analysis.
If it is determined, for example, that floods that
previously qualified as a “500-year event” are now a “100-year event,” then
catchment areas, spillway designs, and dam heights should be adjusted to
reflect this new reality.
Beyond exposed impoundments and flood control structures,
innovative solutions for storage, conveyance, and treatment of water harvested
from these extreme events should be considered if the intended end use is
municipal or industrial.
Since large swaths of the MENA countries within the Arabian
Sea zone are sparsely populated, adaptations that emphasize efficiency and
flexibility in capture or conveyance across vast, often arid regions would be
essential.
These might include groundwater infiltration basins located
in regions statistically determined to be visited by cyclones with increased
frequency, covered tanks (to reduce evaporative losses), and pipelines from
these areas to strategic transfer points in regional infrastructure.
Incorporating passive treatment of captured water, solar, or even small-scale
hydroelectric generation into these designs can augment water and power
security.
Source type is also important. Smaller countries or those
with more homogenous landscapes (such as Bahrain or Qatar) only need to focus
on adaptations to the particular type of extreme event they most often
experience. Infrastructure in Arabian Sea zone countries with diverse geography
such as Oman, however, may be adapted to capitalize on episodic heavy rainfall
or, more rarely, heavy snowfall events and the differences in timing of arrival
of water from each.
Monsoon rains are highly localized, and some of the
countries that border the Arabian Sea, like Oman, are uniquely positioned to
take advantage not just of “Khareef season” but of its reversal as well.
Between the months of June and September, the Salalah region
in southern Oman will experience rain from the prevailing south west relies
that set up along the southern coast as warm, moist air from the Arabian Sea
sweeps toward the Indian Subcontinent.
Toward the end of the Northern Hemisphere summer, this
pattern reverses as East Africa heats up, driving winds from the Gulf of Oman
to drop rain and, sometimes, snow on the Hajar Mountains.
By contrast, cyclones may affect large areas, and are
an increasingly common occurrence in the Arabian Sea, bringing significant
rainfall, storm surge, and high winds. With the aid of advanced sitting tools
(a combination of geographical information system, artificial intelligence, or
updated global circulation models, for example) key regions of the landscape
could be engineered or enhanced to take advantage of such events by acting as
large-scale catchment facilities, capturing precious runoff, wave energy, or
controlling sediment transport. Maximizing the local use of such resources —
for small-scale power, landscape irrigation, or environmental flows — would
remove the need for both conveyance and treatment.
If it sounds as though the line between landscape and
infrastructure has blurred, perhaps it should. If buildings and roadways are
engineered to withstand the impacts of “extreme” climatic events, why not re-imagine
the environment to dovetail with adapted power and water supply infrastructure
and take advantage of the potential windfall? Hurricane
Harvey dumped more than 20x1012 gallons of water on the US Gulf
Coast in the summer of 2017. Had the storm stalled over the US Southwest, 17
years of drought would have been undone and surface system reservoirs would
have been filled within the space of one week.
The blueprint for transforming events such as
these from liability into potential windfall already exists, albeit on a
smaller scale. Many city and regional-level utilities outside
MENA incentivize simultaneous compliance with safety and environmental
standards prior to approving new infrastructure. Scaling up such an approach
would require a similar leap up in planning and regulatory perspective. Urban
planning would become regional planning, with the coordination between civil,
geotechnical, and environmental engineering taken to new levels.
Funding options for such projects would need to evolve
alongside the rising threats posed by climate change. Options for
build-operate-own scenarios under public-private partnerships could be negotiated
through non-governmental, UN, or World Bank-affiliated organizations, such as
the Green Climate Fund or the Global Adaptation Fund, if
government funding for affected countries in the MENA region were limited. Rates
for water could be structured according to the ephemeral nature of the
resource.
The degree of difficulty with which the resource is captured
and conveyed could be incorporated, with the associated costs wrapped into
current operations and management. The money saved by not having to pump and
treat an equivalent volume of this “free water” could be used to further
stretch the resource by being funneled back into reuse-recycling programs, for
example.
The details of such programs are, at this stage, less
important than a broader array of strategies for taking advantage of potential
opportunities to mitigate the damage caused by climate change.
Rather than planning for climate conditions just based on
the status quo of risk management, consider that, if the scale and robustness
of infrastructure are being tested at a level never before experienced in
modern times due to the amplification of climate change impacts, perhaps it is
time for a similar quantum leap of thought on how we approach these challenges
by viewing these climate risks as opportunities.
The MENA countries within the climate influence of the
Arabian Sea will certainly need to buffer against the adverse impacts of
extreme weather but may also look toward finding innovative benefits from
experiencing this level of climate vulnerability.
Courtesy: Middle East Institute
