Alistair Lyon, PlanetArk 15 Nov 10;
Dust storms scour Iraq. Freak floods wreak havoc in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Rising sea levels erode Egypt's coast. Hotter, drier weather worsens water scarcity in the Middle East, already the world's most water-short region.
The Arab world is already suffering impacts consistent with climate change predictions. Although scientists are wary of linking specific events to global warming, they are urging Arab governments to act now to protect against potential disasters.
There are huge variations in per capita greenhouse gas emissions across the region with very high rates for several oil and gas producers. Qatar recorded the world's highest per capita emissions with 56.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2006, while Egyptians emitted just 2.25 tonnes each, U.N. figures show.
While the region as a whole has contributed relatively little to historic greenhouse gas emissions, it is among the most vulnerable to climate change, and emissions are surging.
Inaction is not an option, said Mohamed El-Ashry, former head of the Global Environment Facility, a fund that assists developing countries on climate and other environmental issues.
"It's human nature to wait until there is a crisis to act," he told Reuters. "But you hate to wait until there is really a huge crisis where large numbers of people suffer needlessly."
Measures to tackle the region's environmental woes would also help offset future impacts of global warming.
"Addressing water issues, say, would have the dual benefit of responding to climate change issues, but also addressing the problems that result from population growth, poor management and very weak institutions related to water," Ashry said.
The Arab world's population has tripled to 360 million since 1970 and will rise to nearly 600 million by 2050, according to a U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) research paper this year.
LARGE-SCALE INSTABILITY
"For a region that is already vulnerable to many non-climate stresses, climate change and its potential physical and socio-economic impacts are likely to exacerbate this vulnerability, leading to large-scale instability," it says, adding the poor and vulnerable will suffer most.
Water scarcity, the biggest challenge, is already dire.
By 2015, Arabs will have to survive on less than 500 cubic meters of water a year each, a level defined as severe scarcity, against a world average exceeding 6,000 cubic meters per head.
That warning came in a report last week by the Arab Forum for Environment and Development (AFED), which said the region's water supply had shrunk to a quarter of its 1960 level.
Climate change will aggravate the crisis in a region where temperatures may rise 2 degrees Celsius in the next 15 to 20 years and more than 4C by the end of the century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Its figures, cited by the UNDP paper, show the Arab world has undergone an uneven rise in surface air temperature ranging from 0.2C to 2C between 1974 and 2004.
Water scarcity and rising sea levels are a reality, but public consciousness in the Arab world lags behind.
"People are still not aware of those impacts," said AFED's secretary-general Najib Saab. "When you talk of climate change, they think the impact will be on the moon or other countries."
He cited satellite imagery from Boston University's Center for Remote Sensing showing a one-meter sea-level rise would affect 42,000 square km of Arab land -- an area four times the size of Lebanon -- and 3.2 percent of the Arab population, compared with 1.28 percent worldwide.
"Our study showed that during this century the Fertile Crescent (stretching through Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories) will lose all signs of fertility if the situation continues as it is."
LOST IN BUREAUCRACY
Arab leaders do take water shortages seriously -- if only out of concern for their political survival -- but all too often leave climate change matters to their environment ministries.
"The environment ministries are often the weakest in these countries," said Habib Habr, the U.N. Environment Programme's regional director. "The policies are there, but often what we see is a lack of implementation or enforcement of the law."
In a conflict-prone region largely ruled by unaccountable governments and self-serving elites, political distractions push climate change and other social issues down the priority list, although Tunisia, Jordan and Oman are more active than most.
While conditions vary across the Arab world, declining water resources are often mismatched with burgeoning populations.
Imports of "virtual" water in the shape of food and other goods already amount to the equivalent of 5,000 cubic meters of water per capita, the AFED report says. Most Arab countries effectively said farewell to food self-sufficiency long ago.
In some countries, weather events and water scarcity have forced large numbers of Arabs to leave their homes.
A drought that began in 2007, aggravated by over-cultivation of subsidized cash crops, has displaced hundreds of thousands of people from eastern Syria. In Yemen, water scarcity is prompting many farmers to abandon their land and head for the cities, fuelling the capital Sanaa's 8 percent annual population growth.
Cross-border migration could also intensify due to the uneven distribution of oil and other resources in a region that encompasses fabulously wealthy statelets as well as populous nations such as Egypt, a fifth of whose 79 million people live on less than $1 a day, according to U.N. figures.
"There are bad projections about climate change, water and many things that don't need to happen, or not at the level predicted," said Ashry. "You can minimize that by planning."
Asked his advice for Arab leaders, he said: "It's not a hopeless situation, but you've got to start now or 10 years from now it will be worse because there will be more people, fewer resources and the gap between rich and poor will have widened."
(Editing by Janet Lawrence)
Sea Level Rise Threatens Alexandria, Nile Delta
Dina Zayed PlanetArk 15 Nov 10;
Twenty years ago, Taher Ibrahim raced his friends across Alexandria's beaches, now rising seas have swept over his favorite childhood playground.
Alexandria, with 4 million people, is Egypt's second-largest city, an industrial center and a port that handles four-fifths of national trade. It is also one of the Middle East's cities most at risk from rising sea levels due to global warming.
"There were beaches I used to go to in my lifetime, now those beaches are gone. Is that not proof enough?" asked Ibrahim, a manager at a supermarket chain who is in his 40s.
Flooding could displace entire communities in Alexandria and the low-lying Nile Delta, the fertile agricultural heartland of Egypt's 79 million people.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that the Mediterranean will rise 30 cm to 1 meter this century.
More than half of Egypt's people live within 100 km of the coast. A 2007 World Bank study estimated that a one-meter sea level rise could displace 10 percent of the population.
Officials say salt water could submerge or soak 10 to 12 percent of farmland in the world's largest wheat importer.
"Climate change is happening at a pace that we had not anticipated," Suzan Kholeif of the National Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries told Reuters. "Our records are clear and in my line of work, it is already a reality."
But reliable data on local climate patterns is scarce and official responses are slow and uncoordinated, experts say.
Egyptian officials do not deny there may be risks but doubt the scale of Egypt's vulnerability, saying more research is needed.
"There are international assumptions that sea levels are rising but it isn't happening the way they talk about. We are studying all these scenarios to be prepared," Alexandria governor Adel Labib said.
HOT SPOTS
More than 58 meters of coastline have vanished every year since 1989 in Rasheed, also known as Rosetta, said Omran Frihy of the Coastal Research Institute.
"There are hot spots, but that doesn't mean the whole Delta is at risk. Before we start talking about doom, we need to know where those spots are and act on protecting them," Frihy said.
Increased salinity seeping into underground waters will degrade farmland and cut production, experts say, in a country where food price rises have sparked unrest in the past.
Yet Egypt has no clear and unified climate change strategy.
"There are lots of plans but they are not integrated nor are they complete," said Mohamed Borhan, manager of a U.N.-supported project on how the Nile Delta can adapt to climate change.
"The right priorities are not set and the people working on the plans are failing in communicating," he said.
Some experts argue that uncertainty about the scale of the risk Egypt is facing makes it hard to adopt strategies.
"We are still assessing our vulnerability. There are adaptation options but we need to know what we are up against first," said Mohamed Abd Rabo, professor of environmental studies in Alexandria's Institute of Graduate Studies.
WINTER FLOODING
Winter storms have always flooded Alexandria's streets with sea water, but now waves crash against its courthouse on the inland side of the corniche, alarming some scientists who say water is infiltrating deeper than before.
The municipality has begun erecting coastal barriers to protect the corniche from flooding, but salt water intruding into underground reservoirs could be an even bigger concern for the city founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC.
"Sooner or later, a disaster will happen but when, where and how, we aren't certain. But we shouldn't wait for a catastrophe to come knocking on our doors to act," Kholeif said.
Environment officials have increased inspections of industrial areas and have been pushing to cut greenhouse gas emissions in Alexandria, said Mona Gamal El Din, head of the city's branch of the Environmental Affairs Agency.
But even if industries obey regulations in Egypt, whose emissions do not exceed 0.6 percent of the global total, this would do little to reduce threats to biodiversity, Kholeif said.
A biologist, who has seen sea species disappear due to higher acidity, she said that with 108 endangered species Egypt was the Arab nation whose biodiversity was most at risk.
Taxi driver Ahmed Fattah said he doubted Alexandria itself would disappear beneath the Mediterranean but that he and his family could only wait and see.
"I worry that the government won't do anything until a crisis hits us. By then, we may be swept away by the waves."
(Editing by Alistair Lyon and Janet Lawrence)
Climate Change Worsens Plight Of Iraqi Farmers
Khalid al-Ansary and Serena Chaudhry PlanetArk 15 Nov 10;
Frequent dust storms and scarce rains are stifling Iraq's efforts to revive a farming sector hit by decades of war, sanctions and isolation.
Wheat and rice production has suffered from a severe drought in the past two years, due in part to rising temperatures, along with a dearth of water in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
The U.N. Inter-Agency Information and Analysis Unit (IAU) says water levels in the two rivers -- Iraq's main water sources -- have dropped to less than a third of normal capacity.
"The tendency of rainfall in general is continuously declining. The same for temperature ... you can see there is a rise," said Deputy Environment Minister Kamal Hussein Latif.
Farmers like Akram Mousa now face a struggle to keep their land cultivatable in the once fertile country watered by rivers that nurtured Mesopotamia's ancient civilizations.
"The temperature rise has deformed our crops. They either don't grow properly or wither. It has made me abandon half my farms," said the 65-year-old who owns seven farms of tomato, cucumber and melon in Zubair, in the southern province of Basra.
Farming is one of Iraq's biggest employers, but contributes less than 3 percent of state revenue and gets little investment compared to the oil sector, the source of 95 percent of revenue.
Iraq is among the world's top 10 importers of wheat and rice, purchased mostly for a huge public food ration scheme.
As temperatures creep higher and water levels remain low, desertification is swallowing arable land and hurting crop yields. Mousa said fertile land in the region where he farms had shrunk considerably in his 35 years of cultivating.
In October, the IAU reported a drop in crop cover on almost 40 percent of farmland, especially in the north, in 2007-09.
Nevertheless, somewhat better rains helped Iraq produce 1.7 million tonnes of wheat in 2009/10, up from 1.25 million the previous season, according to the Agriculture Ministry. Output in the previous three years averaged 2.4 million tonnes.
Iraq's population of about 30 million consumes about 4.5 million tonnes of wheat a year, most of which is imported.
DUSTY SCOURGE
Desertification and soil erosion, due partly to climate change and partly to mismanagement, are blamed for the dust storms that have multiplied in recent years, disrupting life in Baghdad and posing health risks for its 7 million people.
Winds blow the dust, mostly from the western desert and north, to the capital, said Amer Shaker Hammadi, deputy head of an Agriculture Ministry committee on combating desertification.
Baghdad endured 122 dust storms in 2008 and 82 in 2009, up from only three or four a year recorded in the 1970s, Latif said. In the former era, the choking tempests lasted no more than 12 hours. Now they can envelop the city for up to 36 hours.
Thanks to its rivers, Iraq is one of only two Arab countries that will pass the water scarcity test of 1,000 cubic meters per person in five years' time, according to a report this month by the Arab Forum for Environment and Development.
That forecast, however, assumes no disruption to river flows from Iraq's upstream neighbors Syria and Turkey.
Tension over water has surfaced, with Iraq accusing Turkey, and to a lesser extent Syria, of restricting flows from the Euphrates with hydroelectric dams and irrigation schemes.
It has urged Turkey to release more water, saying Iraqi farmland and drinking water supplies are at stake.
"Climate change, the change in temperatures, drought, have made (upstream) countries depend on irrigating their land from the rivers. As a result, it has affected Iraq's water share from the Tigris and Euphrates," Ali Hashim, director general of the state commission operating water and drainage projects, said.
According to the IAU, 92 percent of Iraq's total freshwater is used for irrigation and food production.
The Agriculture Ministry has prepared a $70 million plan, approved by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, to improve irrigation on 2 million acres of wheat-growing land.
Combating and adapting to climate change require efforts of a different magnitude. But Iraq, beset by insecurity, power shortages and many other problems, has yet to tackle the issue in a coherent way -- it has taken politicians eight months just to break a post-election deadlock on forming a new government.
In the meantime, some farmers are adapting by themselves.
Hamza Attiya, 45, said he had switched to crops requiring less water on his farm at al-Meshkhab, south of Najaf.
"I have planted Indian pea instead of rice as it doesn't need as much water. We didn't get much income from it this year, only enough for our daily food," the farmer said.
(Additional reporting by Aref Mohammed in Basra and Khalid Farhan in Najaf; writing by Serena Chaudhry; editing by Alistair Lyon and Janet Lawrence)
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