Relative Cooling, Absolute Heating: How Rapid Urbanization Reshaped Thermal Dynamics across the Arabian Peninsula (2000-2020)

Extreme heat and rapid urbanization are converging challenges for the Arabian Peninsula, yet their fine-grained interactions remain poorly understood. We present a high-resolution assessment of land-cover land-use change, population growth, and land surface temperature (LST) across 2000-2020. We found newly urbanized areas converted from desert exhibited significantly lower warming (+1.78°C) than existing urban areas (+2.39°C) and unchanged desert (+2.97°C). However, these newly urbanized areas maintained higher LST than existing urban areas by 2020 (42.68°C versus 41.29°C), creating a thermal situation where 13.1 million new residents live in places with relative cooling yet higher absolute LST exposure. We identified distinct population-thermal pathways: small Gulf states achieved population growth with minimal warming through densification, while larger countries showed sprawl-dominated patterns with varied thermal outcomes. Our findings demonstrate that desert cities experience fundamentally different thermal dynamics than temperate regions and require revised adaptation frameworks accounting for urban cooling potential and extreme baseline temperatures.