Middle East Warming Scenarios: Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and Backcasting

Abstract

The key contributor to anthropomorphic climate change is the use of fossil fuels. Petroleum, both oil and natural gas, are important fuel sources for transportation and electricity generation. Climate scientists have warned us that either we reduce consumption of fossil fuels or the earth's climate will warm to catastrophic levels. The Middle East has been, and continues to be, the source for much of the world’s petroleum requirements. Cutting consumption will be disruptive to the Middle East's primary economic driver. It is not clear that there is a consensus on what environmental policy courses of action impacts will be on the Middle East. This thesis is a starting point at what should be an academic community of experts’ effort to explore what international relations related outcomes may occur and their ramifications at the regional level using United Nations climate reporting. We have combined the UN reporting with the analytic technique called backcasting to foresee the developments likely to occur that deliver the world to a predetermined end status in 2100. This thesis finds environmental and economic changes will likely be significantly detrimental to regional prosperity and/or stability, regardless of the rest of the world's climate policy.