Drying Mesopotamian Marshes Now Struck by Iraq War

By Alexandru R. Savulescu

KYOTO, Japan, March 22, 2003 (ENS) - The United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) will be ready to start work reconstructing Iraq “within days” of the war's ending, Klaus Toepfer, UNEP’s Executive Director, said here at the 3rd World Water Forum today. “We have a standby unit at Bahrain ready to go into the country immediately after the conflict ends,” says Toepfer.

UNEP Executive Director Klaus Toepfer (Photo courtesy IISD)

Presently, UNEP is assessing Iraq’s most urgent needs once conflict is over. More than 20 years of military operations in the Gulf have resulted in great damage to water resources, arable land, and a loss of biodiversity. Much of the damage, Toepfer believes, was deliberate destruction of the environment, and should be treated as a crime against humanity.

“As we mark World Water Day 2003,” says Toepfer, “we are reminded of the dramatic destruction of the Mesopotamian marshlands in southern Iraq over the past decade.”

Mesopotamian marshes in parts of Iraq and Iran in 1973-1976 (Satellite image courtesy UNEP)

Two years have elapsed since UNEP drew the world’s attention to the destruction of the fertile crescent Mesopotamian marshlands, lost mainly as a result of drainage and damming.

The Tigris-Euphrates basin is amongst the most intensively dammed region in the world. The wetlands, which once covered between 15,000 and 20,000 square kilometers, were reduced in 2001 to around ten percent of that area.

Now, in 2003, a further 30 percent, 325 square kilometers, of the remaining transboundary wetland has disappeared.

Mesopotamian marshes in the same parts of Iraq and Iran in 2000(Satellite image courtesy NASA)

A recent UNEP assessment mission in Iraq confirmed that the surviving wetlands are highly degraded, qualifying the area as an “environmental disaster zone.”

New dams and large irrigation projects have tightened the grip on the rivers feeding the surviving marshlands. Internationally recognized as an exceptional human and natural heritage site inhabited by ancient communities descended from the Sumerians, and a haven for globally significant biodiversity, the marshlands have been turned into a desolate wasteland, with vast stretches salt encrusted.

The collapse of Marsh Arab society, of the culture of a distinct indigenous people that has inhabited these marshlands for millennia, adds a human dimension to this modern environmental disaster. A 5,000 year old culture is coming to an abrupt end.

The impact of marshland loss on the area’s wildlife is equally devastating, with significant implications for global biodiversity, as the marshlands provided a shelter and feeding stop for migratory birds from Siberia to Southern Africa.

Marsh Arabs in the days before the marshes became so dry (Photo courtesy Al-amood.dk)

Toepfer called for a holistic ecosystem approach based on the ultimate goal of sustaining riverine ecology, in which all Tigris-Euphrates riparian countries, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, share the rivers’ waters in a coordinated and equitable manner.

“Don’t mistake the ecosystems approach as a luxury item,” is Toepfer’s last warning. “I cannot emphasize enough the economic consequences of conservation of wetlands. It is a matter of livelihoods and survival.”