When Rain Became a Threat: Fifty Years That Changed Libya's Climate

Ask an older farmer near Tripoli what has changed in his lifetime, and he will probably not start with the temperature.

He will start with the calendar. The first autumn rains used to tell his family when to plough. Now they come late, or violently, or not at all. The well his father dug by hand to twelve metres in the 1970s has been replaced by a borehole a hundred metres deep — and the water that comes up tastes of the sea.

Far to the south, in the oasis towns, date palms that fed families for three generations are dying. The young people who might have replanted them have left. These are not isolated stories. Together, they describe one of the fastest climate transformations anywhere on the Mediterranean. Here is what has happened to Libya over the last fifty years — and why it matters to everyone who lives there.

^{Twice as hot, twice as fast}

Between 1971 and 2020, Libya's average temperature rose by about 1.85°C. The world as a whole warmed by about 0.9°C over the same period. In other words: Libya is warming roughly twice as fast as the planet.

The reason is geography. Libya sits between two heat engines — the Sahara to the south, which heats up fast under clear skies, and a Mediterranean Sea that is itself warming and expected to be almost 3°C warmer by the end of the century. The government has recorded 94 major heatwaves between 1982 and 2021. In the Fezzan and Kufra, summer peaks of 46–48°C are now common. Tripoli hit 47°C in 2018.

And it is not over. Under the "medium-high" future used in Libya's climate pledge, the country's average temperature would climb from about 22°C today to about 24°C by the 2050s, with August — already the hottest month — about 2.4°C hotter. If world pollution keeps rising sharply, Libya could be 4–5°C hotter by 2100.

_{The water clock is ticking}

Here is a fact that surprises most people: Libya has no permanent rivers at all.

More than 95% of the country is desert or near-desert. On average, the whole country receives about 26 mm of rain a year — about one-sixteenth of what fell on the town of Al-Bayda in a single day during one storm in 2023. Each Libyan has access to less than 100 cubic metres of naturally renewed fresh water a year, a fifth of the United Nations threshold for "absolute scarcity". And the rain is declining. Since the 1960s, total rainfall has dropped by 7–15%. Droughts now return every two to five years.

So how does Libya drink? The answer is buried deep under the Sahara. The Great Man-Made River — giant concrete pipes, four metres wide — carries "fossil water" from underground reservoirs filled thousands of years ago, when the Sahara was green. Today it supplies more than 80% of Libya's fresh water.

That is the problem. Fossil water barely refills. The system is ageing and works at less than half of its planned capacity. Meanwhile, farming uses 80–85% of all the water and produces less than 2% of the country's income — and up to two-fifths of irrigation water is lost before it reaches the crops.

Along the coast, decades of over-pumping have pulled the underground water down so far that the sea is seeping in to replace it. Wells turn salty. Orchards are abandoned. Libya's own climate report warns that some of this damage may be "irreversible".

_{The mountains are going bare}

Libya's few forests grow on its mountains: the Green Mountain in the north-east and the Nafusa Mountains in the west. They hold juniper, wild olive and strawberry trees — including a species that grows nowhere else on Earth. They are disappearing.

Satellite images  in a study shows that between 1985 and 2017, the natural forest in a large area of the Green Mountain shrank by 39% — about 9,000 hectares — with the fastest losses after 2010. In the Nafusa Mountains, overgrazing and drought are stripping the highlands of their plant cover. Why does this matter beyond the trees? Because forests work like a sponge on a hillside. When they go, heavy rain no longer soaks in. It races down bare slopes, tears away the soil and pours into the valleys below. Keep that image in mind. It explains much of what happened next.

_{The night the sky opened}

In September 2023, a storm called Daniel crossed the Mediterranean after devastating Greece. It slammed into north-eastern Libya and stalled against the Green Mountain.

In 24 hours, the town of Al-Bayda received 414 mm of rain — about three-quarters of what it normally gets in an entire year.