The Blogs: It is Not the Heat That Hurts MENA! — It is the Talent Leaving Because of It?

Every few years a familiar myth returns: hot countries languish because heat makes people less intelligent. It’s a seductive claim, and it’s wrong. What heat actually does in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is raise the cost of governing well and living well. The region’s deepest climate risk isn’t cognitive decline; it’s the steady leakage of skills and ambition.

Temperature is a physical constraint, not a destiny. If heat alone throttled progress, the Gulf’s megacities, Singapore, or Houston would crumble. They don’t, because institutions, infrastructure, and labor markets can be built to protect health, sustain learning, and power productivity. The difference between success and stagnation is not IQ; it is whether countries can keep their people thriving despite harsher weather.

Heat tests systems, not brains

Extreme heat can sap concentration, lower productivity, and harm pregnancy and early childhood development when cooling, healthcare, and nutrition are inadequate. These effects are not immutable; they’re policy-contingent. Air-conditioned classrooms, reliable electricity, prenatal care, and worker protections dramatically blunt the damage. In other words, heat doesn’t reduce intelligence—it exposes institutional weaknesses.

A better way to see this is through the Human Capital Index, which assesses how health and education translate into real-life productivity. Across MENA, the picture is mixed: higher scores in much of the Gulf, lower in parts of North Africa and the Levant. The gaps point not to innate capacity, but to whether early-life health is protected, learning is high-quality, and skills can be put to work at home.

Retention is everything

MENA trains large cohorts of engineers, doctors, researchers, and financiers. Many build careers in Europe, North America, and Asia. This diaspora exists because ability is abundant—and because domestic environments fail to convince enough of these people to stay. Heat sharpens the calculus: when career pathways are uncertain, universities are politicized, funding is patchy, and rules shift unpredictably, rising temperatures become the final nudge out the door.

Women often face an even steeper cliff. Mobility constraints, safety concerns, and care burdens—magnified by heat—push educated women to exit at higher rates, thinning the region’s most diverse pool of talent.

Informal sectors bear the brunt of heat exposure. Construction, logistics, and street-level services slow down or become dangerous under extreme temperatures, cutting incomes and tax revenues that fund public services. The result is a feedback loop: heat worsens service delivery, cities feel less livable, and skilled workers opt out.

The Gulf and the rest: same climate, different outcomes

In the Gulf, high wages, resilient power grids, and climate-controlled urbanism blunt heat’s direct impacts. Talent is imported at scale, but long-term retention is fragile when residency and citizenship are uncertain, or when the post-hydrocarbon transition looks opaque. Elsewhere in MENA, strong education systems often coexist with bureaucratic chokepoints, underfunded research, and weak innovation ecosystems—conditions that amplify heat stress and turn investment in education into an export of graduates.

This is the core paradox: many countries successfully build human capital, then watch it flow away. Low retention is not inevitable. It’s the result of policy choices, uneven urban services, and credibility gaps that climate change makes harder to hide.

Unequal adaptation decides who stays

Cities that deliver reliable cooling, clean and affordable transport, green space, and accessible healthcare keep their professionals—and attract more. Cities that don’t lose legitimacy, fast. Rural-urban divides deepen as climate shocks hammer agriculture and local services; internal migrants crowd overheated cities, and the most mobile ultimately move abroad. With global demand rising for healthcare workers, technologists, and engineers, the push-pull dynamics accelerate brain drain.

Stop chasing IQ shadows; fix the plumbing

National IQ narratives collapse complex realities—education quality, early-life health, testing biases—into a misleading number and give policymakers nothing to repair. The practical agenda is different: make it safe and rewarding to build a life at home under tougher climatic conditions.

What works

• Protect early life: climate-safe clinics, prenatal and neonatal care, nutrition, and heat-proofed schools with reliable power.
• Keep cities liveable: shaded streets, reflective and green roofs, heat-resilient housing, abundant cooling centers, and dependable public transit.
• Safeguard outdoor workers: enforce heat standards, hydration and rest breaks, night-shift options, and emergency response during heatwaves.
• Stabilize the knowledge economy: predictable regulations, depoliticized universities, competitive research funding, and open scientific collaboration.
• Unlock women’s full participation: safe mobility, childcare, flexible work, and anti-discrimination enforcement.
• Make energy reliable and clean: resilient grids, efficient cooling, and rapid deployment of renewables to cut costs and outages.
• Tap the diaspora: returnee incentives, fast-track credentialing, and venture financing that welcomes founders back.

Metrics that matter

• Graduate return and retention rates five years after degree completion.
• Researcher and clinician stay rates within domestic institutions.
• Patent-to-commercialization conversion and startup survival.
• Professional longevity in cities that face recurring heatwaves.
• Human Capital Index progress, especially in early-life health and learning-adjusted outcomes.

The real diagnosis

Temperature doesn’t explain why economies diverge; institutional reliability and human capital retention do. Heat speeds up the reveal: gender gaps widen, informal workers suffer, rural areas empty, and urban services are stress-tested in public. Climate change will not make people less capable—it will make capable people less willing to stay unless cities and systems earn their confidence.

MENA’s problem is not a shortage of intelligence. It is a shortage of trust—trust among its best minds that the future they want can be built at home. Build that trust with credible climate adaptation, frictionless career paths, and dependable rules, and the region’s greatest renewable resource—its people—will do the rest.