IS THIS the final curtain for the Middle East’s Fertile Crescent? With the region beset by drought and a slew of projected new dams in the pipeline, it is looking increasingly likely that the Mesopotamian cradle of civilisation will become a desert.
In ancient times the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers through Iraq were bountiful, sustaining civilisations such as Sumer and cities like Babylon. That stands in stark contrast to a detailed assessment of the region’s future under climate change, published in 2007 by Japanese and Israeli meteorologists (Hydrological Research Letters, ). This suggested flow on the Euphrates could fall by 73 per cent, with the authors warning that the ongoing drought in the region was likely to become permanent.
“The ancient Fertile Crescent will disappear in this century,” lead author Akio Kitoh of Japan’s Meteorological Research Institute in Tsukuba told 91av. “The process has already begun.”
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A series of dams is further reducing the region’s water supply. Last week, Iraqi ministers called for urgent talks with upstream neighbours Turkey and Syria, after the combination of drought and dams cut flow on the Euphrates to 250 cubic metres a second – less than a quarter of what is needed to maintain crops in Iraq.
Tension between Turkey and Iraq has been growing since May, when the Iraqi parliament refused to approve a trade deal with Turkey unless it contained binding clauses on river flows. But Turkey appears in no mood to compromise. In July, Turkey announced it is to go ahead with yet another dam, the Ilisu on the Tigris, and Iraq’s hydrological misery is compounded by Iran, which is also building new dams on tributaries of the Tigris, according to Hassan Partow at the UN Environment Programme. “Some of these rivers have run completely dry,” he says.
Curiously, Iraq is set to worsen the problem by building its own dams, says Partow, including one of the world’s tallest on another Tigris tributary.