Increasing temperatures over the coming decades will likely provoke water shortages, crippling heat waves and extreme weather, the experts from Europe, northern Africa and the Middle East said at their inaugural gathering last week in Bologna, Italy.

"The Mediterranean is especially vulnerable, and faces the threat of large-scale human migration and the disruption of local economies," geophysicist Antonio Navarra, who spearheaded the initiative and heads Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, told AFP.

"We are looking at major impacts that could put tremendous stress on agriculture, water management, energy production and tourism."

A major report released Friday in Bangkok by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations' top authority on the global warming, outlined ways to mitigate the greenhouse gases -- especially carbon dioxide -- generated by human activity that drive up temperatures.

IPCC reports issued in February and April assessing climate change trends and impacts confirmed that the Mediterranean basin would be hit especially hard by mounting temperatures, which are predicted to rise globally by 1.8 to 4.0 C (3.2 to 7.2 F) by the end of the century.

Navarra's European Union-funded initiative -- dubbed CIRCE, Climate Change and Impact Research: the Mediterranean Environment -- seeks to fill a gap in climate research, which has tended to be either global or very local, he said.

"The demand for this kind of regional study is very high -- people want to know what will happen in their corner of the world," he said. "It is also challenging from a scientific point of view."

The project is co-directed by Laurence Tubiana, who also heads France's Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations.

CIRCE differs from the IPCC's massive review, carried out every five years, in two important respects: it will produce new studies rather than simply summarizing existing scientific knowledge, and it will work directly with the "stakeholders" -- those affected on the local level -- in searching for the best adaptation solutions.

It may also serve as a model for other regions, Tubiana suggested.

Participants at the Bologna meeting, which set the agenda for the four-year project, emphasised that the impacts of global warming were already at hand. "These problems are not going to go away, they are only going to get worse," commented Thomas Downing, a professor at Oxford University and the Director of the Oxford branch of the Stockholm Environment Institute, a non-governmental organisation. "This is no theoretical exercise in cost-benefit analysis."

Downing cited the impact of rising seas on land use the Egyptian city of Alexandria, one of a dozen case studies targeted in the CIRCE project. By working directly with local officials and engineers, the scientists seek to identify the best strategies for adapting.

"We hope to avoid jumping to the idea of dikes and sea walls," he added, pointing to a growing inclination by worried policy makers to "climate-proof" everything. "We know that will not work in the long run."

The Nile River delta, Venice and the Tunisian island of Jerba, which depends heaving on tourism, are also threatened by rising seas.

Looking at the potential economic impacts, Navarra points out that extreme water stress and scorching summers could discourage many of the 200 million tourists who traditionally flock to the Mediterranean each year. "Tourism is one of the most water demanding industries there is," he said.

Add smelly and potentially toxic algae blooms at seaside resorts into the mix, along with increased energy costs for air conditioning, and the picture begins to look grim.

"Any single impact would probably be manageable, but when you add them all up" things get more complicated, Downing said.

The IPCC report on impacts said the summer water flows in southern Europe could be reduced by up to 80 percent by 2070, and that hydropower is expected to drop by 20 to 50 percent all around the Mediterranean.

"Only a few governments and institutions have systematically and critically examined a portfolio of measures" to cope with climate change," the report concluded.

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