According to reporting by the AP in Baghdad, Iraq, one of the largest oil-rich countries on earth, has been hit by five sandstorms in the past month. The nation is one of the five most vulnerable nations to climate change and desertification.
Over 5000 people were hospitalized as a result. People could not breathe independently; one person had been confirmed dead.
Climate change is, of course, a threat multiplier. When a drought is in progress, amplifying scorching air temperatures, water evaporation, and desiccation of crops due to greenhouse emissions is the deadly result. Our civilization has relied on oil and coal for centuries, primarily since the Great Acceleration started in the 1950s. We have not slowed the danger we face, on the contrary, the peril has only increased.
As a result, Iraqis become food and water insecure and risk hunger, deadly dehydration, heatstroke, and kidney damage.
Hundreds of Iraqis have been taken to hospitals with breathing problems and Baghdad airport suspended flights for several hours as a thick sandstorm blanketed the country, the fifth to engulf Iraq within a month.
Iraqi state media said most of the patients suffered respiratory issues as clinics across the country’s north and west struggled to keep up with the influx. Authorities urged citizens to stay indoors.
Iraqis awoke to an ochre-coloured sky – and a thick blanket of dust covered the roads and buildings with an orange film. Visibility was low and drivers kept car headlights on to see the road.
Flights scheduled to depart overnight and on Thursday morning were postponed. They resumed by the afternoon, when the dust began to clear.
Iraq is prone to seasonal sandstorms, a type of dust storm in desert areas, but experts and officials are raising alarm over their frequency in recent years, which they say is exacerbated by record-low rainfall, desertification and climate change.
Dozens of farming villages are abandoned, but for an isolated family here and there. The intrusion of saltwater is poisoning lands that have been passed for generations from fathers to sons. The United Nations recently estimated that more than 100 square miles of farmland a year are being lost to desert.
Years of below-average rainfall have left Iraqi farmers more dependent than ever on the dwindling waters of the Tigris and Euphrates. But upstream, Turkey and Iran have dammed their own waterways in the past two years, further weakening the southern flow, so a salty current from the Persian Gulf now pushes northward and into Iraq’s rivers. The salt has reached as far as the northern edge of Basra, some 85 miles inland.
In the historic marshes, meanwhile, men are clinging to what remains of life as they knew it, as their buffaloes die and their wives and children scatter across nearby cities, no longer able to stand the summer heat.
Temperatures in Iraq topped a record 125 degrees this summer with aid groups warning that drought was limiting access to food, water and electricity for 12 million people here and in neighboring Syria. With Iraq warming faster than much of the globe, this is a glimpse of the world’s future.
Dust and sandstorms have always occurred in the Middle East but grown more frequent and intense in recent years, a trend that has been associated with overuse of river water, more dams, overgrazing and deforestation.
The fine dust particles can cause health problems such as asthma and cardiovascular ailments, and also spread bacteria and viruses as well as pesticides and other toxins.
The storms are expected to grow more intense with worsening climate change because higher temperatures and more irregular rainfalls dry out land faster and accelerate desertification.
Sandstorms also cause economic damage by reducing visibility, sometimes to near zero, shuttering airports and highways and causing damage to buildings, vegetation and solar panels.
Many parts of the middle east, including Iraq, will need to empty in the coming years and decades. There will be few that will be able to. Europe and North America will not welcome climate or economic refugees from this part of the world.
The world is becoming an increasingly dangerous and ugly place. For decades, governments have been warned of dire consequences if we do not transition to a clean environment. The chickens are coming home to roost.