Baghdad- In the middle of the summer season, where the south was occupied Iraq The highest temperatures recorded globally, signs of water levels receding in the marshes, causing fears of problems that threaten an environmental crisis.
Experts attribute this crisis to evaporation and the decrease in flow towards the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, especially from the Euphrates basin and what is known as the tail regulators of the “Qarmat Bani Saeed” waters, which directly affect both The marshes Central and western Hammar marsh.
The marshes are a registered trademark in Mesopotamia, and represent a cultural heritage dating back thousands of years with all its natural and biological diversity, visual identity, and natural facility for tourists that has taken shape over the centuries.
The marshes also represent an economic resource for tens of thousands of Iraqis living around those areas, as they contain various types of fish and marine products, in addition to being a habitat for the buffalo, which is widespread in the provinces of Maysan, Dhi Qar and Basra.
Al-Huwaiza Marsh in Maysan Governorate, southern Iraq, in particular, is suffering from an environmental disaster that has caused the death of millions of its fish, at a rate of up to 95%, during the past week due to the decline in water levels, which has issued a stern environmental warning to the concerned authorities responsible for water resources and environmental pollution in Iraq.
The Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources said that it decided to increase the water flow in the Al-Hawizeh Marsh as a quick executive measure after a number of fish died in the marsh, and sent a team assigned by the Prime Minister’s Office to visit the Al-Hawizeh Marsh to follow up on the fish deaths.
The ministry confirmed that the field tour revealed that “the reason for the fish deaths is the low oxygen levels due to high temperatures and the crowding of fish in shallow water areas, with low water releases due to the scarcity of revenues from the upstream countries and the violation of the marshlands’ water quotas.”
Al-Hay’ah Net | Drought and water shortage risks portend serious repercussions in #Iraqas a major drought hits the waters. #Marshes In the south of the country, amid warnings of continued population migration from these areas.
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Threat to demonstrate
In this context, the environmental expert and specialist in the marshlands region, Ahmed Saleh Ne’ma, confirmed that the amount of water released by the Water Resources Directorate, which the ministry promised after the residents threatened to demonstrate, did not actually reach the marshes, due to the consumption of the largest amount by the areas that precede the marshes and grow the rice crop, which consumes large amounts of water.
Speaking to Al Jazeera Net, the expert explained that the effects of the drought between 2021 and 2024 are still present and the marshes have not yet recovered from them, stressing that water releases in the Al-Hawizeh Marsh have decreased from 30 cubic metres per second to 3 cubic metres per second recently.
Nima called on the Ministry of Water Resources to work on allocating appropriate water quotas to compensate for the shortage in the central marshes and the western Hammar Marsh, including the Umm al-Wada and al-Jabaish marshes, and to treat water pollution according to the environmental impact study submitted to the Advisory Board in the General Secretariat of the Council of Ministers by the Nature Iraq organization in 2009 based on its assignment.
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He stressed the importance of the Baghdad government responding to the requirements of registering the marshes on the World Heritage List, and the plan for their management on the one hand, and providing a specific share of water for them in accordance with the Land and Water Strategy in Iraq, called “SORLI”, and the drought management scenarios included therein.
The Iraqi marshes are among the largest lakes and bodies of water in the Middle East, with a total area estimated at 20,000 square kilometers. They are depressions in the ground where river water collects, then turns into vast lakes of varying depths.
Southern Iraq includes three main marshes: Al-Hawizeh Marsh on the Iranian border, Al-Hammar Marsh in the middle of the region, and the Euphrates Marsh that extends north and west of Basra and south of the Amara region near the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates.
Insufficient capabilities
In a related context, MP Thaer Makhif, head of the parliamentary water committee, said that the Ministry of Water Resources has partially contributed to solving the problem of the marshes, but its available capabilities are not sufficient to end the crisis from its roots because the issue of managing water releases is a file that exceeds the efforts of the Iraqi state, and Iraq also suffers from a lack of dams and reservoirs that can provide a water reserve from rainfall that can overcome seasons of water scarcity.
In his interview with Al Jazeera Net, Makhif added that the Iraqi negotiations with its neighbors, Turkey and Iran, regarding the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have not yielded positive results so far, which casts a negative shadow on the water file in general.
Iraq is facing the threat of a water crisis again, after suffering from a sharp decline that has threatened drinking water in recent years, not to mention the scarcity of irrigation water for crops in all of Iraq’s central and southern regions.
In mid-March 2023, the Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture announced that about half of the agricultural lands in all cities of the country had gone out of production, as a result of the drought that struck the country between 2020 and 2023 due to the decline in the levels of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the scarcity of rain, which disrupted the exploitation of 27 million agricultural acres.
According to the 2019 Water Stress Index forecast, Iraq will be a land without rivers by 2040, and the waters of the two rivers will not reach their final outlet in the Arabian Gulf. The total consumption rate for all needs – at a minimum – in Iraq is about 53 billion cubic meters annually, while Iraq needs 70 billion cubic meters to meet its needs.
Despite the heavy rains that fell last winter in Iraq, the process of benefiting from them remains ineffective, for many reasons, including the small number of dams in Iraq and the weakness of strategic projects to provide and limit those quantities.
The use of modern irrigation methods is still limited in Iraq, and this was one of the reasons for the dispute between Iraq and Turkey when discussing increasing water releases from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers during the Turkish president’s visit to Baghdad last April.
Make up for the shortcomings
The Iraqi government says that it has taken various measures in its water policy to address the shortcomings that have accumulated over the past years, including preparing a plan to build new dams, maintain existing dams, spread the culture of drip irrigation and modern sprinklers and distribute them to farmers, and establish world-class fields using internationally approved methods.
It also includes drying up about 300 unlicensed artificial lakes for fish farming, to confront water scarcity. It is also conducting negotiations with Turkey and Iran focusing on the percentage of water in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the intersecting branches on both sides of the border in northern Iraq.
Iraq has been exposed to difficult environmental changes during the past ten years. The Iraqi Prime Minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, confirmed last March that 7 million Iraqis were affected by climate change, as the phenomenon of global warming caused waves of drought, sandstorms, and dust storms.
Iraq was ranked fifth among the countries most affected by climate change in the world, which prompted the government to launch a climate strategy that focuses on water management, the construction of the Green Wall of Iraq, and considering the climate file as a sovereign file.
According to the latest global survey launched by the Swiss company “IQR”, which specializes in manufacturing air purifiers in 2023, Iraq ranked second as the most polluted country in the world, as air quality deteriorated to 80.1 micrograms of PM2.5 particles per cubic meter from 49.7 micrograms in 2021.
Iraq blames the policies of upstream countries that have built huge dams and diverted many tributaries feeding the two rivers, according to officials in Baghdad. This deterioration is also attributed to climate change, lack of rainfall in the region, and increased unsustainable water use, according to United Nations offices operating in Iraq.
