Sunday, July 30, 2023

Iraq's government ignores climate change

At FOREIGN POLICY, Winthrop Rogers reports:


On a Friday in March, Nabil Musa led a group of young people out into nature for a hike. It was, for him, an ideal way to teach them about their important role in protecting the area’s increasingly fragile ecosystem—just one of the many small actions he has undertaken to help his community reckon with the effects of climate change, pollution, and drought.

Formally, Musa is the waterkeeper for Iraqi Kurdistan as part of a group known as the Waterkeeper Alliance, a worldwide grassroots network of environmental activists that has its origins in a group created in 1966 by fishers in New York to clean up the Hudson River. He also runs a local initiative called Experience Wilderness, which helps people connect with the natural world, and is active in the local art scene.

His group that day consisted of 15 refugees from Qamishli, a predominantly Kurdish town in northeastern Syria. They currently live in the Arbat camp in Sulaimaniyah governorate, where approximately 9,000 internally displaced Iraqis and Syrian Kurdish refugees who fled the Islamic State and Turkish military interventions have settled. Many have been there for years with little prospect of returning home.

Musa led the teenagers on a day hike through Kani Shok, a dramatic gorge that cuts through a mountain ridge an hour’s drive north of the camp. “It’s going to be tough,” Musa warned them. He wore gray hiking pants and a blue tie-dye quick-dry shirt for the outing, while the teens followed him in clunky tennis shoes and jeans.

[. . .]

After 10 years, he returned to Sulaimaniyah to be closer to his family, but he found it a changed place. The birds and willows were gone, and the Sarchinar River no longer flowed in the summer. This sense of profound loss pushed him to become an activist. “It was heartbreaking to see it in this shape,” he said. “It was not the river I left, and all my dreams were gone.”

As we made our way to the gorge, we crossed a bridge over the Sarchinar River. Musa remarked that the water level was very low for March, just a slim current meandering through the deepest parts of the gravel bed. It had not rained much over the previous three years, creating a persistent drought, and a rainier winter this year had only begun to chip away at the deficit.

“This water is vulnerable,” he said. “When we neglect and abuse it, the water cannot shout, and the water cannot say, ‘Don’t do this to me.’” 

The rivers that feed the Mesopotamian Basin are heavily dammed by Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq, with downstream communities suffering from significantly reduced water flow. Blocking the watercourses also changes their ecology, altering temperature and chemical composition and destroying the habitats of the fish and other wildlife that need the rivers in order to live. Activists from across the region are sounding the alarm about the accumulating damage of climate change, drought, and pollution to the environment and local populations. A change to one part of the watershed inevitably affects all the others. What upstream communities choose—or fail—to do can mean that those who live downstream end up bearing the cost.

In a phone interview, Salman Khairalla, an Iraqi environmental and human rights activist who frequently collaborates with Musa, said, “We talk about the environment from political, economic, and social perspectives.” Khairalla is co-founder and CEO of the water advocacy group Humat Dijlah—“Protectors of the Tigris” in Arabic—which is largely funded by foreign foundations. “When we talk about water and the environment, we link those topics with job opportunities, counterterrorism, and infrastructure,” he said. “We link it with what the people want.”


Iraq is at the front line of climate change.  What's taking place is happening there first and what's really sad is that, even with the change and destruction staring them down, the Iraqi leaders are as inept as every other leader in the world.  You'd think those most at risk right now would have leaders who demanding action but that is not the case.  Meanwhile, Stefan Lukas (IPS) reports:


The United Nations representatives who took the microphone in Baghdad in early June 2023 to talk about Iraq’s current drought had little reason to be optimistic. While Germans and Central Europeans were moaning about one of the year’s first heatwaves with temperatures from 30-34 degrees, in southern Iraq, prolonged temperatures above 50 degrees and long overdue rains have been destroying its marshlands, the ecosystem at the heart of the Middle East’s ‘fertile crescent’. Other stretches along the Euphrates and Tigris are also facing huge challenges: if climate change in the region continues like this, by 2050 it will suffer more than 300 sandstorms a year. Evaporation, reduced water flow and lack of rainfall will reduce the entire country’s water capacity to a minimum. Too little water stored in the soil available for agriculture has serious consequences for both rural and urban populations. More than a year ago, Iraqi Minister of Environment Jassim Abdul Aziz al-Falahi hinted at what scientists had predicted much earlier. What has already begun to happen will, within the next decades, also impact the surrounding countries and the European community.

As in other Middle Eastern countries, ever more critical climatic conditions are affecting the daily lives of much of Iraq’s population, which still needs the same regular access to fresh water that allowed advanced civilisations to flourish there centuries ago. But precisely that is becoming increasingly difficult – because of multiple factors over which Iraq has only limited influence.

At the turn of the 20th century, water flow of 1,350 cubic metres per second was normal. Today it’s just 149. The tributaries of the large Euphrates, Tigris and Diyala rivers are increasingly drying up. Apart from the drought plaguing Iraq’s mountainous regions, Iran and Turkey are constructing dams and other retention basins and taking more and more water for their own needs. In particular, Turkey – the source of nearly 70 per cent of Iraq’s fresh water – has escalated repressive policies to force through its own interests in Iraq’s (Kurdish) north. This, despite the 2021 agreement between Ankara und Baghdad on increased water flow.

The now minimal water flow is further aggravated by evapotranspiration, which causes 14.7 per cent of Iraq’s surface water to evaporate each year. Grain-growing regions along the rivers and in the southern marshes are almost completely drying up. Some bodies of water, like the Hamrim reservoir and the Umm Al-Binni lake have already lost more than 50 per cent of their volume and are expected to turn into desert in the next years. This is causing local, often agricultural, communities to lose their livestock and livelihoods. These Iraqis, some of whom who have lived in the country for centuries, have no choice but to migrate to bigger cities, where they also have to struggle to survive.

In 2022 alone, according to the Iraqi Ministry of Migration and Displacement, more than 7,000 farmers and their families left rural areas. Iraq’s high level of urbanisation had dipped in the late 1990s but has been rising due to climate change: in 2021, 71.2 per cent of its population lived in cities like Baghdad, Basra, Najaf and Mosul. The rural exodus thus has other ramifications, including the growing difficulties that many municipalities have in maintaining their dilapidated water and electricity infrastructures. All this as the country lurches from one political crisis to another.


What's taking place is taking place in the open.  It's not hidden.  And yet there is no action.  


ARAB NEWS noted last week, "The country is now considered the fifth most vulnerable to the climate crisis by the UN.  According to the United Nations, 90 percent of the country’s rivers are polluted and Iraq will meet only 15 percent of its water demand by 2035.  Almost 70 per cent of the marshes are dry, putting many species of fish at risk of extinction."  Yet no action, no move to address what's taking place.


If the Iraqi government isn't going to address this, what hope do the rest of us in other countries have?


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