Urban expansion moderates warming yet intensifies absolute heat exposure across rapidly growing Arabian Peninsula cities

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 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 surface temperature than existing urban areas by 2020 (42.68 °C versus 41.29 °C, on average), creating a thermal situation where 13.1 million new residents live in places with relative cooling yet higher absolute surface temperature exposure. We identified distinct population-thermal pathways: small Gulf states achieved population growth with minimal warming through urban 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. From 2000-2020, 13.1 million new residents settled in newly urbanized areas in Arabian Peninsula that cooled relative to deserts yet remained hotter than existing cities, according to high-resolution analysis combined land-cover change, population growth, and land surface temperature data.