[AsiaTimes] A 2016 report from the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shows that the Levant region – which includes Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Syria and Turkey – is currently going through its worst drought in around 900 years.
| A DOOM and GLOOM article. |
This is likely to get worse, too, according to the recent International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This has concluded that by the end of the century, the Middle East as a whole will be some 40% drier than it is now, if current trends continue.
At the same time, there has been a huge increase in population.
While in 1950, the Middle East and North Africa was home to some 110 million people, by 2017, this had reached 569 million. According to a recent European Union-funded research project by MENARA, if current trends continue, the figure will be more than one billion by the end of the century.
In some countries too, such as Iran and Turkey, the government actively encourages citizens to have even larger families, adding to the pressure on dwindling resources.
Syria is also an example of this. The country’s main bread basket is the northeastern Hasaka region. This has also historically been a part of the country with a large ethnic Kurdish population.
“From the 1950s, Syria pursued a policy of Arabisation of this area,” says Professor Jan Selby, from the International Relations Department at Sussex University. “Many Syrian Arabs were resettled there to marginalise the Kurds, with whom the regime was in conflict. This rapidly increased the population and the pressure on water resources. In other words, it wasn’t so much that environmental problems caused conflict, as that conflict caused environmental problems.”
In the Gulf, meanwhile, highly arid states have invested in schemes such as desalination plants to address their growing populations and water needs.
Indeed, despite having no permanent surface water and a fast vanishing aquifer, the Gulf states are now amongst the heaviest users of water per person in the world.
Desalination may not be a long-term answer however.
“There is an unintended consequence,” says Aisha Al-Sarihi, Visiting Scholar at the Arab Gulf State Institute in Washington. “There is a lot of use of energy to desalinate, which means increasing oil and gas use, which in turn increases greenhouse gas emissions, negatively affecting climate change.”
One other feature of the region is that some 60% of its surface water resources are trans-boundary, running across borders.
At the same time, most of the region’s nations also share transboundary aquifers – the large, underground water resources often accessed by farmers, via wells.
“If we are looking for a solution,” adds Dr. Shadkam, “we should stop the blame game and adapt as soon as possible. If we don’t, the Middle East will become uninhabitable in the near future.”
|
