World Heritage Status Sought for Restored Marshlands of Iraq

Believed to be the location of the Biblical Garden of Eden, these once vast wetlands were 90 percent destroyed by the Saddam Hussein regime.

UN and local efforts have restored 60 percent of the Marshlands, and introduced solar power to serve local residents.

The plan to designate the Marshlands as a World Heritage site was agreed at a meeting today in Kyoto, Japan. The initiative, to be supported by funding from the government of Italy, aims to further the conservation of this wetland of global cultural, natural and environmental importance.

Iraqi Environment Minister Narmin Othman, who is in Japan for the event, said, "I am very happy that we are now going to work towards making the Marshlands a national park and a globally important World Heritage Site."

A typical Marsh Arab village of homes on man-made islands floating on waters filled with reeds and mud. (Photo courtesy UNEP)

"Now we have 50 to 60 percent of Marshlands back we can look forward to further improvements and putting them on the map as Iraq’s first mixed, natural and cultural World Heritage site as befits an area of global significance," said Othman.

The Iraqi ministries of environment, water resources, municipalities and public works, and the state minister for the marshlands are cooperating with the UN agencies to craft a marshland strategic management and development plan.

According to UNESCO, which manages the World Heritage treaty, the earliest that Iraq could make a submission to the World Heritage Committee might be 2010. If approved, the Marshlands of Mesopotamia could be listed as a World Heritage in 2011.

The World Heritage management support plan follows a four year, $14 million project undertaken by the UN Environment Programme to restore the ecological viability of the site while bringing sustainable livelihoods to its inhabitants, the Marsh Arabs.

These 5,000 year-old heirs of the Babylonians and the Sumerians, and their wetland home had been targeted by the former Iraqi government, which forced up to 300,000 of them into exile or camps in and outside Iraq.

In the early 1970s, the Marshlands, consisting of interconnected lakes, mudflats and wetlands in the lower part of the Tigris-Euphrates basin, extended over 20,000 square kilometers of Iraq and Iran. They served as the spawning grounds for Gulf fisheries and were inhabited by species like the sacred ibis.

Upstream dam construction on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers diminished water flows and eliminated the flood pulses that sustained wetlands in the lower basin, and increased pollution concentrations. By 2000, over 90 percent of the area had dried out to saltpans with severe ecosystem damage, accelerated by the construction of extensive drainage works.

The UN Environment Programme estimated then that the Marshlands would be completely lost within three to five years unless urgent action was taken.

With the collapse of the Saddam Hussein government in mid-2003, local residents began breaking the drainage embankments and opening the floodgates to bring water back into the marshlands.

The Marshlands in their natural condition (Photo courtesy UNEP)

The UNEP marshland management project, which began in 2004 with funding from the UN Iraq Trust Fund, the government of Japan, and the government of Italy, has been working with the Iraqi environment ministry and local communities to accelerate improvements.

These include environmentally friendly methods of providing safe drinking water for up to 22,000 people, the planting of reed banks and beds as natural pollution and sewage filters and the introduction of renewable energies such as solar.

UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said today, "I would like to thank the governments of Japan and Italy for their support and congratulate the Iraqi people on these extraordinary achievements."

"The work in the Iraqi Marshlands may have been unique and challenging for a whole variety of reasons. But the lessons we have learnt go beyond Iraq’s border," Steiner said. "They provide a blueprint for the restoration for the many other damaged, degraded and economically important wetland ecosystems across the world."

Chizuru Aoki of UNEP’s International Environmental Technology Centre in Japan, which has been coordinating the project, said today that the Italian funds will be used to draw up and implement a sustainable preservation and management plan.

This will include pilot projects on community-wide ecosystem management and cultural preservation as well as capacity building, jointly with UNESCO and the Iraqi authorities.

A Marshland Information Network has been established. Training in satellite and field monitoring and wetland restoration and management has also been part of project which today completed its final evaluation phase at the Kyoto meeting.

At today's meeting, Environment Minister Othman requested that UNEP provide support for Iraq's accession to multilateral environmental agreements so that Iraq can take part in the international environmental challenges and opportunities facing the planet.

Multilateral environmental agreements include the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, the Convention of Migratory Species and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Aoki said, "It is essential that we continue to work with the Iraqi partners, UNESCO, as well as other relevant organizations to help Iraq move towards this goal."

Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2008. All rights reserved.