Part Two: Desertification and Carbon Dioxide

The environment - scarier than a SCUD?

The AHDR authors positioned their chapter on environmental threats strategically. By putting it high up in the report, they want to emphasize the importance of addressing the environment, even though the average Middle Easterner might sense more pressing threats to their own human security, such as getting bombed. But though environmental threats may seem less formidable than others, the authors write, their consequences "are often irrevocable, more damaging and more extensive."

Water shortages, pollution and desertification comprise the triad of major environmental threats to Arab human security. All three will likely be worsened by the overarching problem of climate change, and each endangers the very core of a secure life: sustenance and housing.

More people, less space

To set the stage, let's talk about the pressures created by Arab population growth. In the late 1970s, the average Arab woman who lived through the end of her childbearing years would have six or seven children. By 2000-05, that rate had declined to between three and four, but the net Arab population growth rate is still estimated to remain nearly twice as high as the world average over the next six or so years, and the report estimates that Arab countries will be home to some 385 million people by 2015.

By comparison, the United States currently has a population of just over 304 million in an area that is several million square kilometers smaller than the Arab world but likely has more space for people to live in. (To emphasize the point: 54.8 percent of Arab land is considered "empty," according to former United Nations official Mostafa Kamal Tolba, while 14.5 percent is arable. In the U.S., 18 percent of the land is arable.) The Arab world is also incredibly young: 60 percent of the population is under 25. The median age is 22, compared with 28 worldwide and 37 in the U.S., and young people consume more resources, the report notes.

All this population growth, concentrated in the limited sustainable environments available in the region, means a lot of people who need both water, which is relatively scarce, and food, the production of which often damages the environment.

Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink

Academics and writers increasingly theorize that "water wars" will become more prevalent in next few decades as climate change gradually raises the Earth's temperature and causes a scramble among arid and semi-arid countries for water resources. If that happens, we can expect to see it early in the Middle East.

Less than half (43 percent) of the Arab world's 277 billion cubic meters of yearly available water originates in Arab countries. Permanent rivers, Arabs' main source of surface water, are often shared between countries: Iraq, Syria and Turkey share the Tigris and Euphrates; Lebanon, Syria and Turkey share the Orontes; Palestine, Israel, Jordan and Syria share the Jordan. Valuable renewable groundwater aquifers also stretch beneath multiple countries: Israel and Lebanon; Israel and Palestine; Syria and Turkey; Syria and Iraq.

Yet despite this interconnectedness, where overpumping or pollution on one side of an aquifer can harm the whole thing, the Arab world is marked by a lack of interstate agreement on water rights, and cooperation is "heavily affected by prevailing tensions and ongoing conflicts."

"Poor distribution and heavy demand, especially of ground resources, characterize water use in the Arab countries. This leads to a lack of clean water for much of the population and the waste of significant amounts in the agriculture, industry and tourism sectors," the report states.

The Arab world's amount of renewable water per capita is seven times smaller than the overall worldwide ratio. Among Arab countries, only Lebanon's supplies of renewable, internal freshwater exceed the 1,000 cubic meters per capita that constitutes scarcity, and in several countries, including Egypt, Libya and three Gulf states, the ratio is 100 cubic meters per capita or less.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, as the Arab population increased, Arab governments "exerted great efforts" to make drinking and agricultural or industrial water available to their people and actually increased, by 2 percent, the amount of citizens with access to such water. But "water stress" is expected to continue to affect Arab countries and remains dangerous without joint agreements.

The encroaching desert

Some millenia ago, the Arab world exited an epoch of humid weather and entered into a prolonged dry spell. The results are obvious, even to those whose only references to the region stem from pop culture images of camel-riding Bedouins, Pyramids and picturesque sand dunes.

Nowhere in the Arab world does the desert make up less than a third of the terrain. In the Arabian Peninsula, its nearly 90 percent, and in the Mashreq, the region known as the Fertile Crescent, the desert has claimed almost 36 percent of the land. "Desertification," the process by which land degrades in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas, threatens a fifth of the Arab world, according to the AHDR.

Although the climate obviously plays a role, the AHDR emphasizes mankind's contributions to desertification. Since modern agricultural trends - particularly in ploughing - began to take root in the 1800s and 1900s, Arabs "have greatly weakened the rejuvenating capacities of the region's ecosystems, distorted the environmental equilibrium, and propelled it towards degradation." Many new agricultural technologies are also inappropriate for arid and semi-arid lands because they cause the soil to decompose and disintegrate.

The combined factors of population growth and competition for scarce arable land helped cause horrific tribal warfare in Sudan's western Darfur and Kordofan provinces. Sudan featured the full spectrum of desertification-related problems: A sedentary farming lifestyle that caused a demand for more cropland and expanded use of inappropriate technologies, thereby eroding the land, plus a lack of restraint in irrigation and deforestation that aided "desertifying forces" such as water and wind erosion, the exposure of rock beneath the soil, and the over-saturation of the soil.

But all is not lost to desertification, according to the report, whose researchers came up with methods to combat desertification in what they define as the Arab world's three major climatic zones: areas that depend on irrigation and rainfall for agriculture, and areas that depend on one or the other.

In countries that utilize both irrigation and rainfall - the luckiest of the bunch, you might say - the report recommends some changes that most advanced societies have already implemented: strengthen infrastructure such as dams, reservoirs and canals; halt overgrazing; reduce the use of harmful pesticides such as DDT, measure precipitation more accurately to prevent surprise floods.

The recommendations for countries that depend mostly on irrigation, such as Egypt, focus on preserving what arable land currently exists. Foremost is the need to combat the encroachment of the desert by curbing sand-carrying winds and stabilizing sand dunes. The report recommends windbreaks, possibly made of trees, for the former, and fences, "petrochemical sprays" or rubber blocks for the latter. Particular attention should be paid to the Nile Delta region, the authors write, and officials must plan for rising sea levels that could put significant amounts of farmland underwater.

The report's advice for rain-fed countries tends toward more basic survival strategies that are better suited for arid land. Officials need to help promote appropriate farming techniques such as crop rotation and plan carefully in advance to create much-needed dams. Farmers should record, identify and breed plants that will reproduce best.

Cloudy skies and murky waters

Pollution is the third danger in the triad of environmental threats addressed in Chapter Two. The primary contributor to air and water pollution in the Arab region is agricultural, due to the "increased use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and horticultural and veterinary medical treatments that leave long-lasting traces," according to the report.

As we read earlier, water is scarce in the Arab world. Making matters worse, around 14 percent of the Arab world has no access to safe water and 29 percent has no access to sanitation. Yemen is by far in the worst position here: Nearly 60 percent of the population has no access to sanitation and around 32 percent has no safe water. If what water is available to the Arab world is also polluted, that increases the risk of illness in the population (particularly dysentery among children) and means families, often the women, must spend more time and effort finding what water is clean.

Pollution in Arab countries is relatively small, but increasing faster than in most other regions of the Earth. Large, advanced nations such as the United States and Russia still far eclipse the net water pollution of the entire Arab world put together, but almost every Arab country produces more water pollution per capita than either the U.S. or Russia. Although Arab countries produce far fewer carbon dioxide emissions than other regions, that's mostly due to a lack of industrialization, and Arab CO2 emissions are increasing by 4.5 percent per year, the second-fastest rate in the world. Between 1999 and 2003, emissions more than doubled in the United Arab Emirate and Oman, doubled in Algeria and nearly doubled in Egypt.

Despite global efforts to combat air pollution, the report says, "socioeconomic development, population growth, water scarcity and the growth of the oil industry have led to increased use of heavy fuels to meet development needs including power generation, cement production, oil refining and desalination of water." Aircraft operating in the Arab world don't always meet environmental standards, and personal vehicle ownership in some countries - Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Lebanon - approaches the levels of the United Kingdom and U.S., increasing pollution.

You think it's bad now?

Although Arab world relies more on oil for fuel than any other region in the world, Arab countries produce, at least at the moment, some of the lowest amounts of greenhouse gases. Nevertheless, Arabs will suffer dearly if the negative effects of climate change come to pass: Water shortages, reduced agricultural production and large population movements are just a few possible ramifications.

Freshwater river levels will fall, while salinated sea waters will rise. A sea-level rise of one-half meter would flood thousands of square kilometers in the Nile Delta, make 2 million refugees in Egypt and causing $35 billion in economic losses, according to the AHDR. An increase in world temperature levels by a couple degrees Centrigrade, predicted to occur by 2050, would reduce Lebanon and Morocco's water supplies by 15 and 10 percent, respectively. Yet while some Gulf countries have banded together to create a $750 million fund to address climate change, "efforts in the Arab countries to confront the effects of these changes do not match the gravity of the threat."

Arab countries have ratified most environment-related conventions, such as the Kyoto Protocol, and the brunt of responsibility for reversing global warming should be born by the highly industrialized nations that created it in the first place, the AHDR authors write. But Arab nations still need to make some efforts. Taxation and economic incentives can be used to coax businesses into environmentally sustainable practices. The regional states should band together to create an "an Arab agency to coordinate specialized networks for environmental issues, collecting available information from Arab regional organizations, harnessing expertise and formulating the alternatives needed to tackle these issues." If it sounds challenging, that's because it is, but the alternative painted by the AHDR makes anything else sound like probable disaster.