Answer extracted from the Beyond the Deck podcast — listen to the full episode below.
What health threats does climate change create in desert regions like the GCC?
Climate change is driving acute heat stress and heat stroke among outdoor workforces in arid regions, while simultaneously threatening access to fresh water and enabling disease-carrying organisms to spread into previously unaffected areas. In the GCC, where desert climates already constrain water availability, these compounding pressures create urgent public health emergencies that healthcare systems have barely begun to prepare for.
Heat stress and water scarcity as dual crises
Arid climates like those across the GCC already face structural water challenges, but climate change amplifies this strain exponentially. Rising temperatures intensify heat-related illnesses among workers, especially those in outdoor industries—construction, agriculture, and logistics—where exposure is continuous and unavoidable.
Beyond direct heat illness, water scarcity threatens entire supply chains. Fresh water powers everything from manufacturing facilities to cold chains that preserve food and medicines. As detailed in the episode with Elsy Dumit, the loss of reliable water access creates cascading public health failures—hospitals lose capacity to sterilize equipment, vaccine refrigeration breaks down, and populations lack hydration in environments where dehydration becomes a life-or-death condition.
Disease vectors expanding into new territories
Climate change doesn't just amplify existing threats; it creates entirely new ones. Disease-carrying organisms like mosquitoes are migrating farther from their traditional geographies as global temperatures rise, bringing diseases into regions where they have never been endemic.
This geographic expansion means that diseases historically confined to tropical zones—dengue, malaria, and others—now pose risks to GCC populations unprepared for them. As discussed in Beyond the Deck, public health surveillance systems and disease control infrastructure in the GCC were designed for existing endemic patterns, not for novel pathogens arriving through environmental change.
"Climate change for us in public health is probably one of the biggest threats to public health."
Elsy Dumit — Principal in Healthcare and Life Science Practice at Rollenberger, with an extensive career building resilient healthcare systems across GCC institutions and governments. She holds a Master's degree in Public Health and Global Health from Johns Hopkins University, degrees in biotech from Georgetown, and previously led emergency preparedness and outbreak response initiatives at PAHO (Pan American Health Organization), the WHO regional office for the Americas.
The intersection of heat stress, water scarcity, and disease spread reveals how climate change doesn't present isolated threats but rather interconnected health emergencies that strain every layer of healthcare systems, from frontline worker safety to supply chain resilience to epidemic preparedness.
See also
What is epidemiological transition and how does it reshape disease patterns in developing economies?
Epidemiological transition occurs when a country increases its socioeconomic status and affluence, shifting disease patterns toward non-communicable and chronic diseases that demand different public health interventions.
What are the main healthcare trends driving change in global public health systems today?
The main trend is the continued increase and prevalence of non-communicable or chronic diseases in both lower and higher income countries, reshaping how public health systems allocate resources and design interventions.
Why is localizing solar and wind component manufacturing important for the GCC energy sector?
Localizing manufacturing of solar and wind components will have massive impacts on job creation, GDP growth, and localization scores, while positioning the region as a regional hub for renewable energy technology.