Abdulaziz Al Qarawi, a forecaster for the Kuwait Meteorological Department, warned that by 2035 his country would enter a “dangerous phase” as annual temperatures are expected to rise by about two degrees Celsius than in 2010.
Al-Qarawi told Reuters that those rates actually rose by 1.1 degrees between 2010 and 2021 compared to the previous 30 years. Record temperatures have been recorded in Kuwait over the past few years, including 54 degrees in the Jahra region northwest of the capital in 2021 and 53 degrees in the Sulaybiya region west of the capital in 2020, both of which are populated areas.
Al-Qarawi said that temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius were recorded in Kuwait one, two or even four days a year in the 80s and 90s, but now they are recorded, perhaps 20 days a year. The intensity of air, lightning and dust storms hitting the country has also increased, which are usually loaded with dust, leading to cases of suffocation, especially in people with chest diseases, and also transmit harmful bacteria and increase the spread of skin diseases.
Many believe that Kuwait, either individually or in cooperation with its neighbors, can mitigate the rise in temperature by a few degrees if it can plant large areas of desert that extend north and south. Kuwait plans to convert 15 percent of its energy into renewable sources by 2030.
To achieve this vision, Kuwait has established the Al Shakaya Renewable Energy Complex in the northwest of the country as part of an initiative adopted and implemented by the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research that aims to transfer and localize a combination of renewable energy technologies to Kuwait for power generation. The government has also adopted the construction of green buildings in its new projects, the most important of which is the new Kuwait Airport project currently under construction.
However, astronomer and historian Adel Al-Saadoun believes, according to what he explained in an interview with Reuters, that the effective solution is to plant about twenty million trees in Kuwait to bring the temperature down by five degrees Celsius. Al-Saadoun points out that the northern and western regions should be prioritized in the afforestation process, as they are the main source of dust-carrying winds, which creates a problem for most of the population, especially in summer.
