Iraq's Environmental Meltdown

by Stephen Leahy

(IPS) -- Three wars combined with decades of boycott and mismanagement have devastated the natural environment of Iraq, and international efforts to restore it are being constrained by the ongoing conflict.

"It's just too dangerous to do any work there right now," said an international environmental worker who asked to not be identified.

For example, "the post-war looting damaged the country's sanitation facilities far more than the war itself," she told IPS.

"Everything, including the bolts, was stolen from some water treatment plants. The infrastructure is in a real mess."

People around the world will celebrate Earth Day on Apr. 22. Iraqis have little to cheer about.

Raw sewage from Baghdad's 3.8 million people continues to pour in to the Tigris River. The city's three sewage treatment plants have not operated since at least the war, and possibly before.

Most of Iraq's sewage treatment plants were only partially operational prior to the conflict, and shortages of electricity, parts and chemicals have exacerbated the situation, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

In the past year, billions of dollars have flowed into Iraq, including $3.2 billion from USAID to patch up sewage infrastructure, among other things. But progress has been slow.

The agency says it hopes to have one of Baghdad's sewage treatment plants working by mid-year and the rest a few months later.

The nation's 140 major water treatment facilities are only operating at 65 percent of their pre-war capacity, adds USAID.

Such facilities were already inadequate before the war, and their condition was largely responsible for the tripling of diarrhoeal disease in children under five between 1990 and 1999.

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reported in 2003 that 72 percent of the children it surveyed had had diarrhea.

Today, despite repairs to pipelines and other facilities, many Iraqis, especially those living in the country's south, are still forced to drink contaminated water. Child mortality is estimated at one in eight, the highest level outside of Africa.

The Iraq Ministry of Health, the only government body not controlled by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in the occupied nation, faces many challenges, including thousands of unexploded bombs and extensive mine fields.

Oil fires set around Baghdad during the war contaminated the air and water with compounds that damage lungs and can cause cancer. But unlike attacks during the 1991 Gulf War, just nine oil wells were set alight and oil spills were relatively few following the second U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

But Iraq's oil industry also produces large quantities of toxic waste during normal operations. This, combined with low environmental standards for chemical factories, tanneries and other industries, has resulted in the production of eight times more hazardous waste per capita than in the United States, according to a 2003 report by the U.N. Environment Programme.

The best-known environmental issue in Iraq is the destruction of the Mesopotamian marshlands.

Believed by some to be the site of the biblical Garden of Eden, the marshes were once the world's largest, at roughly 20,000 sq km, an area more than twice the size of the Florida Everglades.

Famous for their rich biodiversity and home to millions of birds, the marshes were also a natural filter for waste and other pollutants in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, protecting the Persian Gulf, which has now become noticeably degraded along the coast of Kuwait.

In the late 1980s, construction of a series of dams upstream and the deliberate draining of the marshes by Hussein following the Gulf War destroyed more than 90 percent of the eco-system, which had been home to 500,000 people, including many who took part in an aborted attempt to overthrow the leader.

Because of the site's importance for migrating birds, water quality and in the production of rice, fish and dairy foods, efforts to revive the marsh began right after the first Gulf War.

Plans for restoration were drawn up by a group of wetland experts in 2001 at the behest of the Eden Again Project. Funded by the Iraq Foundation, a U.S.-based group of Iraqi expatriates, the sole purpose of the project is help Iraqis restore their marshlands.

"About 20 to 30 percent of the marshes have been re-flooded, mainly by local marsh dwellers themselves," says Project Director Suzie Alwash.

Some areas are doing very well this year, with lush reed re-growth; in others areas little is growing. The ad hoc restoration is unlikely to be sustainable, Alwash said in an interview.

The project faces enormous challenges because of competing interests -- some former marshland is now being farmed, for example -- and because of the complex biology of a wetland in a very dry region. There is not enough water to restore the entire marsh to its pre-war state, and areas of it are too saline or toxic to be reflooded.

Scientific surveys and planning will cost somewhere between 10 and $20 million. To date, Italy and Canada have committed millions of dollars and support for the restoration and to help build the needed scientific capacity locally.

Iraqis will travel to Jordan in May to participate in a scientific workshop on the restoration organised by international wetland experts.

"It's a wonderful idea. Iraqis need to be at the centre of the restoration or it will fail," said Alwash.

Iraq's Ministry of Water Resources has publicly committed to making the restoration its number one priority, she added.

A less obvious source of damage to both the environment and health of Iraqis resulted from the extensive travel over the country's deserts by heavy military vehicles.

"It's a guarantee that Iraq's sand and dust storms will be much worse from now on," says Farouk El-Baz, director of the Centre for Remote Sensing at Boston University in the United States.

That will lead to increased respiratory problems for Iraqis, adds El-Baz, who extensively studied the damage done to Kuwait's deserts during the Gulf War.

Most deserts have a thin, top crust of pebbles and sparse vegetation that keeps the wind from stirring up the underlying layers of sand. Heavy vehicles break up this crust, making the sand vulnerable to wind, he explained in an interview.

In Kuwait, the resulting sand dunes topped 10 m in height and kilometres in length, and marched across farms, roads, villages and airports, threatening to bury parts of Kuwait City itself, he added.

The red sandstorms that U.S. and British forces faced in 2003 were the first direct evidence that this process is underway in Iraq, according to El-Baz. These moving sands are a major threat to agriculture as well.

"There's no way of telling how bad things are right now," he added. "And with bullets flying, there are other priorities."