The day the soil will become unfarmable is not far away. Kiomars Bujibli, Iranian farmer
CNN has an interesting read on the dramatic issue of a climate crisis unfolding in the middle east. Currently, the middle east is in drought, as are so many places on earth with wildfires igniting forests.
Besides the stress of staring down a water supply that has run out, the people that live there are experiencing ‘temperatures so high that they are barely fit for life’ due to a combination of heat and humidity (wet-bulb temperature).
The problem for most lifeforms is a habitability zone or Goldilocks zone where temperatures are neither too cold nor too hot and perfect for liquid water to exist — this is rapidly changing due to fossil fuel emissions and increasing water vapor in the atmosphere steaming the planet.
There is only one planet we know of so far that is teeming with life––Earth. And on our planet, water is a critical ingredient for life as we know it. While astronomers still don't know whether there's life on other planets, they narrow the search for potentially habitable worlds using a handful of criteria. Because our blueprint for life is Earth, astronomers look for planets with Earth-like characteristics, like liquid water. But a celestial object can only orbit so close (like Mercury) or so far (like Pluto) from its star before water on its surface boils away or freezes. The 'Goldilocks Zone,' or habitable zone, is the range of distance with the right temperatures for water to remain liquid.
The water is running out from mismanagement, river diversion, and climate change. People will no longer live in the optimum goldilocks zone for much longer; some areas have already been abandoned.
If we can’t handle migration now, imagine the emptying of the middle-east.
CNN writes:
Some Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, Iraq and Jordan, are pumping huge amounts of water from the ground for irrigation as they seek to improve their food self-sufficiency, Charles Iceland, the global director of water at the World Resources Institute (WRI), told CNN. That's happening as they experience a decrease in rainfall.
The Middle East's winters are projected to get drier the more the world warms, and while the summers will be wetter, the heat is expected to offset its water gains, according to scientists' latest projections published earlier this month by the UN Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change report."The problem is, with this whole temperature rise, whatever rainfall will come will evaporate because it is so hot," Mansour Almazroui, director at the Center of Excellence for Climate Change Research at Saudi Arabia's King Abdulaziz University, told CNN."The other thing is, "This rain is not necessarily going to be usual rain. There's going to be extreme rainfall, meaning that floods like those happening in China, in Germany, in Belgium, these floods will be a big problem for the Middle East. This is really a big climate change issue."
As with the climate crisis, the water crisis is a slow-moving apocalypse tiptoeing behind us. Most people can be distracted as the news constantly changes and a new shiny candy for the media to obsess about.
This rainfall in Mecca was no slow soaking rain.
The consequences of water becoming even scarcer are dire: Areas could become uninhabitable; tensions over how to share and manage water resources like rivers and lakes could worsen; more political violence could erupt.
In other words, water wars.
From National Geographic in 2016:
As regions and nations run short of water, Damania says, economic growth will decline and food prices will spike, raising the risk of violent conflict and waves of large migrations. Unrest in Yemen, which heavily taps into groundwater and which experienced water riots in 2009, is rooted in a water crisis. Experts say water scarcity also helped destabilize Syria and launch its civil war. Jordan, which relies on aquifers as its only source of water, is even more water-stressed now that more than a half-million Syrian refugees arrived.
Jay Famiglietti, lead scientist on a 2015 study using NASA satellites to record changes in the world’s 37 largest aquifers, says that the ones under the greatest threat are in the most heavily populated areas.
"Without sustainable groundwater reserves, global security is at far greater risk,” he says. “As the dry parts are getting drier, we will rely on groundwater even more heavily. The implications are just staggering and really need to be discussed at the international level.”
Millions of people in Syria and Iraq are at risk of losing access to water, electricity and food amid rising temperatures, record low water levels due to lack of rainfall and drought, international aid groups warned Monday.
The two neighboring countries, both battered by years of conflict and mismanagement, are in need of rapid action to combat severe water shortages, the groups said. The drought is also disrupting electricity supplies as low water levels impact dams, which in turn impact essential infrastructure, including health facilities.
More than 12 million people in both countries are affected, including 5 million in Syria who are directly dependent on the Euphrates River. In Iraq, the loss of access to water from the Euphrates and Tigris River, and drought, threaten at least 7 million people.
Some 400 square kilometers (154 square miles) of agricultural land faces drought, the groups said, adding that two dams in northern Syria, supplying power to 3 million people, face imminent closure.
SNIP
They warned that several Syrian provinces — including Hassakah, Aleppo and Raqqa in the north and Deir el-Zour in the east — have witnessed a rise in water-borne diseases. The areas include displacement settlements housing tens of thousands of people displaced in Syria’s 10-year conflict.
After protestors took to social media to complain about the management of water facilities in the governorate, hundreds of citizens demonstrated across dozens of cities in the western Khuzestan Province, including the capital, Ahvaz, demanding access to potable water.
The Iranian government initially adopted a forceful response. Last week, Amnesty International said that over eight people in Iran, including a teenage boy, were killed during a deadly crackdown by security forces.
Amnesty’s Evidence Lab, part of its Crisis Response Team, reported it received verified footage showing Iran’s security forces using “unlawful force” with automatic weapons and shotguns to crush mostly peaceful protests taking place across the southern province of Khuzestan.
On 15 July, widespread demonstrations erupted in the southwest province of Khuzestan, one of the hottest places on earth, where summer temperatures often rise above 50C. Amid these harsh conditions, people have faced significant water shortages, due to poor planning from the Islamic Republic’s government throughout its 40-year-long history.
The freshwater in water-stressed areas such as lakes and rivers tends to become more saline as evaporation occurs, making farming crops difficult to irrigate. In addition, the existing bodies of water are heavily polluted from human activity.
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Water Is Life
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