Based on research published earlier this year in the frame of the ACCREU project by Jessie Ruth Schleypen, Fahad Saeed, Anne Zimmer and Tilman Brück, concerning the effect of dry and hot extremes on poverty and income equality, the Cyprus Institute published a Policy Brief focusing on the study’s estimated impacts for Cyprus.
According to the paper of Schleypen et al., Cyprus has been hit slightly more strongly than the EU average: Heat and drought events up to now have cost income losses of about 5% for the total population and 9% for the poorest households. But impacts in Cyprus are expected to be much worse than the EU average in the future, due to more frequent occurrences of compound dry-and-hot events as global warming increases.
If global warming remains at 2°C higher than preindustrial levels, Cypriot households at-risk-of-poverty may increase by 10%, i.e. to 25% compared to today’s level of 14,9%. However, with current policies, a global warming level of 2.7°C higher than preindustrial levels is projected to occur by the end of the century; in such a case, without serious measures for climate adaptation, Cypriot households at-risk-of-poverty may increase from 14.9% today to 49%, or almost half of all households.
Income losses due to climate change may amount to 54% of future income levels in Cyprus, double the European average. This means that most of future income growth may be offset by the negative effects of climate change, therefore threatening Cyprus’ economic and social development, unless global emissions are limited and more adaptation actions are implemented to cope with more severe weather conditions.
The findings highlight the importance of protecting the Cypriot population from adverse climate change impacts by scaling up financial and technical support to strengthen climate resilience, especially for the most vulnerable.
The Policy Brief is available here and has received extensive coverage in national media outlets of Cyprus.