The demise of mesopotamian marshlands.

• Position: Brief Article

A round 85 per cent of the Mesopotamian marshlands--the largest wetland in the Middle East and one of the most outstanding freshwater ecosystems in the world--have been lost mainly as a result of drainage and damming, according to a report by the United Nations Environment Programme.

Despite intermittent warnings against the imminent decline of the Mesopotamian marshlands, there has been little immediate action to avoid such a fate, the report of UNEP explains. Iraq's difficult situation in the past decade has limited access to and hindered monitoring of events in the marshlands. As a result, this major ecological disaster, broadly comparable in extent and rapidity to the drying of the Aral Sea and the deforestation of large tracts of Amazonia, has gone virtually unreported until now.

The cause of the decline is mainly as a result of damming upstream, as well as drainage schemes since the 1970s. The Tigris and the Euphrates are among the most intensively dammed rivers in the world. In the past forty years, the two rivers have been fragmented by the construction of more than 30 large dams, whose storage capacity is several times greater than the volume of both rivers. By turning off the tap, dams have substantially reduced the water available for downstream ecosystems and eliminated the floodwaters that nourished the marshlands.

The immediate cause of marshland loss, however, has been the massive drainage works implemented in southern Iraq in the early 1990s, following the second Gulf War.

Although some of these engineering works were meant to deal with chronic salinization in the inter-fluvial region, historically Mesopotamias main environmental problem, they were expanded into a full-fledged scheme to drain the marshlands.

Recent satellite images provide hard evidence that the once extensive marshlands have dried up and regressed into desert, with vast stretches salt encrusted. Furthermore, satellite imagery shows only a limited area of the marshlands having been reclaimed for agricultural purposes.

A small northern fringe of the AI-Hawizeh marsh, straddling the Iran-Iraq border (known as Hawr Al-Azim in Iran), is all that remains. Even this last vestige is rapidly dwindling as its water supply is impounded by new dams and diverted for irrigation purposes.

The collapse of Marsh Arab society, a distinct indigenous people who have inhabited the marshlands for millennia, adds a human dimension to this environmental disaster. Around 40,000 of...