The Deep Roots of Iraq’s Climate Crisis
JULY 11, 2023 — ZEINAB SHUKER
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CONTENTS
1A Different Kind of Climate Change Analysis
2Drought, Dust, and Heat
3Displacement
4Decades in the Making
5State Decay
6A Toxic Invasion
7A Power Vacuum
8The Stable Disaster
9A Costly Addiction
10Lessons for the Region
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
Iraq is one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world. Extreme weather and drought are already displacing thousands.
This report launches an open-ended Century International research initiative focused on climate change in the Middle East, by investigating the deep roots of Iraq’s unique vulnerability.
Iraq’s precarious climate position is the result of a history of colonization, international intervention, poor homegrown governance, and decades of environmental neglect.
This analytical framework suggests the shape of effective Middle Eastern responses to climate change: fostering stability, democracy, diverse economies, and robust institutions is the best long-term path to climate resiliency.
This report is part of “Living the Climate Emergency: Lessons from Iraq,” a Century International project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations.
This report is the first in “Living the Climate Emergency: Lessons from Iraq,” a new Century International project exploring how policymakers and researchers can draw on the case of Iraq and its neighbors to translate into action the growing consensus that the climate crisis is already here. Century’s Climate Emergency project will connect field researchers, policymakers, and a wider audience through roundtables, public events, podcasts, and reports. Future research in this project will place today’s crisis in a historical context; map the contours and human impact of climate change in Iraq and its neighborhood; and finally, drawing on the lessons of the extreme case in Iraq, make projections about the future and propose solutions.
Military strategists sometimes talk about “draining the swamp” to quash an insurgency. When Saddam Hussein faced an insurrection in southern Iraq in the early 1990s, he took the idea literally, draining thousands of square miles of Iraqi marshland to deny Shia rebels a base of operations and to retaliate against anyone connected to them. The brutal campaign destroyed an ancient way of life and caused severe damage to a globally significant ecosystem.
Three decades later, just as the marshlands are poised to recover, they have begun to dry up again. This time, the causes are more indirect: a multiyear drought, upstream diversions, and inefficient or crumbling agricultural infrastructure. Climate change looms above all these problems—and contributes to or amplifies each through direct or indirect channels.1 Hotter temperatures evaporate water faster, disasters like droughts become more extreme, the competition for resources (like the water in upstream reservoirs) becomes more vicious, and everything that goes wrong becomes more expensive to fix.
The plight of the marshes at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates is a microcosm of the plight of Iraq, which has been described as the fifth-most vulnerable country, in terms of climate change, in the world.2 Peel back the headline emergencies—heat and drought—and you’ll discover a morass of interrelated and mutually aggravating problems that are firmly rooted in decades of structural limitations, de-prioritization of the environment, and poor governance. For decades, Iraq’s environment and ecosystems have been the subject of myriad threats, whether conflict, short-sighted economic policies, or limited institutional capacity. These problems have accumulated over the years to place Iraq in a highly environmentally vulnerable position.3
Identifying the right climate policy levers in Iraq—both to mitigate the effects of climate change and to fulfill Iraq’s responsibilities toward the regional and global effort to limit climate change—requires a thorough understanding of the country’s recent history and how it relates to the environment. This report launches an open-ended Century International research initiative focused on climate change.
A Different Kind of Climate Change Analysis
As in Iraq, so too the region. All of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is deeply vulnerable to climate change. Some of this vulnerability is geographical accident—semiarid and arid regions suffer more directly from drought, and regions that are already among the hottest in the world experience the most extreme new heatwaves. But a much bigger reason for the precarious climate situation in the Middle East is its unique history of colonization, international intervention, and poor homegrown governance.
Some of the countries in the MENA region have very carbon-intensive economies—meaning that they rank among the highest globally in per capita emissions. Still, the region is responsible, overall, for only about 5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.4 Yet it is suffering disproportionately because of global climate change, which is a threat multiplier in an already fragile region.
Century International’s climate change project outlines three basic analytical axes that are fundamental to understanding Iraq’s climate crisis and responding to it. These analytical axes are also useful in the MENA region more broadly.
The first is that the economic, social, and political context matters. Climate change in Iraq cannot be cordoned off from foreign intervention, an oil-dependent economy, broken institutions, corruption, authoritarianism, and poor governance. This report, the first in the project, aims to provide an overview of the larger economic, social, and political context shaping Iraq’s climate crisis. Climate change in Iraq must be demystified. It is not an abstract future threat; it is a measurable process that is already dragging down the country. Further, it is not just an environmental crisis, but also a social crisis—and it is happening today. A subsequent report in this project will examine the impact of climate and environmental degradation on the ground, and how these conditions impact the daily lives of Iraqis.
The second is that Iraq does not exist in a vacuum. The MENA region as a collective is highly vulnerable to climate conditions, especially Iraq’s neighbors. As a result, to further understand what increases the vulnerability in Iraq, the second part of this project will look at Iraq’s neighbors and their existing climate crisis, as well as some of the successful steps taken by other rentier economies and why Iraq remains far behind.
The third analytical axis is an examination of the limitations on true and effective responses to the climate crisis by the state. While there are indications that Iraqi leadership is aware of the issue and willing to address it—ratifying the Paris Agreement in 2021, for example—state mitigation remains wishful thinking without the right tools and resources. This will be the topic of the third report.
With these analytical axes in place, policy becomes a matter of sequencing and priorities. Iraq, however, is still far from such a reality. And the need for change could not be more urgent.
Drought, Dust, and Heat
According to some studies, Iraq is heating twice as fast as the global average.5 These trends are expected to worsen over time. Days where temperatures hit 120 degrees will go from around fourteen per year to more than forty over the next two decades, according to a report by the European Union Institute of Security Studies. Baghdad is already becoming intolerably hot, and is expected to continue to bear the worst of the increased heat because of its limited green spaces, uncontrolled urban development, and dysfunctional housing designs.6
Severe heat will be devastating. Iraq is already one of the countries most exposed to high heatwave severity, with 6 percent of children exposed to extremely high temperatures; UNICEF estimates that by 2050, every child in Iraq will be exposed to high heatwave severity. Children suffer disproportionately from such heat exposure because they don’t regulate body temperature as well as adults. As UNICEF puts it: “The more heatwaves children are exposed to, the greater the chance of health problems, including chronic respiratory conditions, asthma, and cardiovascular diseases. Babies and young children are at the greatest risk of heat-related mortality. Heatwaves can also affect children’s environments, their safety, nutrition, and access to water, and their education and future livelihood.”7
The increase in temperature has a domino effect on other weather patterns, and resource quantity and quality. Water evaporates more quickly. Iraq is already one of the top twenty countries for water insecurity as a result of water mismanagement, outdated infrastructure and irrigation methods, and the inability of the Iraqi government to negotiate with its neighbors over water share and access. As Turkey is struggling with its own water shortage, Iraq’s northwestern neighbor has invested in several dam projects, of which the massive Ilisu Dam on the Tigris is the best known. These projects have decreased water levels in Iraq, and the calls from Iraqi officials to officials in upstream countries, including Turkey and Iran, often lead to no meaningful outcome.8
Increased strain on the water supply is already showing. By 2022, some 39 percent of Iraq’s arable land territory had already been desertified.
There’s nothing new about Iraq’s cross-border water issues—since the 1960s, unilateral irrigation plans have altered the rivers’ flows. Iraqi officials have long maintained that the dams Turkey built on rivers are causing a decline in water levels and severe droughts in Iraq. Meanwhile, Turkey blames Iraq’s poor management and outdated irrigation systems for the latter’s shortages. Whatever the cause of Iraq’s water shortages, it is certain that more rapid evaporation and more extreme droughts will only make this long-standing problem worse. In 2019, the World Bank estimated that the gap between the water demand and supply in Iraq could increase from 5 billion cubic meters to 11 billion cubic meters by 2035.9
Increased strain on the water supply is already showing. By 2022, some 39 percent of Iraq’s arable land territory had already been desertified.10 An additional 54 percent of arable land is now at risk of imminent desertification.11 The 2020–21 rainy season was the second driest in the last forty years. This led to the reduction of water flow in the Tigris by 29 percent and in the Euphrates by 73 percent.12 In 2022, the Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources warned that the country’s water reserves had halved since the previous year.13
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