Anna Cabré
Climate physicist, oceanographer and research consultant at the University of Pennsylvania
The Mediterranean is a hotspot of climate change because it is warming faster than the global average but, above all, because the region is highly exposed and vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
We are not prepared or adapted for what is happening in terms of extreme events, let alone what is coming, and this study describes it in numbers. For example, the extreme rainfall event in Libya would occur once every 300-600 years in today's climate. In other words, it is very unlikely. However, this event is now 50 times more likely than without climate change. That is, unlikely but not as unlikely as before.
We need to adapt for unlikely but high-risk events, and for that we need more studies like this, so that we can adapt by knowing what level of risk we are exposed to. This allows us to design infrastructure (in this case dams) that can withstand more extreme events than before, and to have planned escape routes in the event that the event exceeds the capacity of the infrastructure.