Scientists have warned that southern Spain and Portugal could have a climate like current day Morocco, if the climate continues to change at the current rate.
Guiot and Wolfgang Cramer, of the Mediterranean Institute for Biodiversity and Ecology, studied pollen cores from sediments found in lake mud to build a picture of vegetation and climate during the last 100 centuries.
More oak pollen suggested periods of humid and temperate climate while more fir and spruce pollen indicated chillier conditions.
The coast of the Mediterranean is renowned for its moderate climate, but the whole of Southern Europe could become a desert by the end of this century if global warming continues to raise the planet’s temperature.
"With two degrees of warming, for the Mediterranean we will have a change in the vegetation which has never been known in the past 10,000 years,” lead author of the study Joel Guiot, a palaeoclimatologist at the European Centre for Geoscience Research and Education in Aix-en-Provence, France, told Inside Climate News.
In that new climactic territory the vegetation and ecosystems of the Mediterranean basin will shift.
“Everything is moving in parallel,” Guiot told Nature. “Shrubby vegetation will move into the deciduous forests, while the forests move to higher elevation in the mountains.”
The end result, the study says, will be the desertification of large areas of Southern Europe, a change that will likely have far-reaching impacts, perhaps beginning with an economic downturn.
Cities like Lisbon and Seville receive millions of tourists per year, tourists who come for the food, the scenery, the history and the climate. The less pleasant the climate becomes, the fewer tourists are likely to come, and those that do may find themselves at greater risk of a natural disaster.
Guiot said that wildfires, along with extreme heat and drought could lead to widespread crop shortages and ultimately political upheaval and civil war, such as happened in Syria in 1998 and 2010.
"It's not just climate - political organisation is important as well," said Guiot, adding ”But if you amplify a problem of war with the problem of climate, the consequence can be more important."
