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Environmental Dimensions of Postcrisis Recovery in Iraq & Yemen

• 28.09.2018
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By Margo Balboni States have invested in Iraq’s and Yemen’s crises largely to confront enemies. Iran supports militias as a low-cost way to undermine Western encirclement and increase its regional weight. Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states—particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—assume more assertive regional postures to counter Iran’s influence. While U.S. tensions with Iran are rising under the Trump administration, the United States increasingly frames its engagement in Iraq and Yemen narrowly around defeating jihadi-salafi militants. As outsiders’ engagement concentrates on rolling back visible adversaries, attention to the political and socioeconomic drivers of tension has been uneven. Some of the most sweeping risks—environmental and climate crises—are the most likely to be overlooked because they are “threats without enemies.”1 For Iraqis and Yemenis, these environmental threats are not a sideshow or a future problem. In Yemen, more people died in local conflicts over water and land in 2011 and 2012 than in the civil uprising to oust dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh.2 Iraqis’ access to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that have sustained the land’s population for millennia is growing increasingly tenuous while farmland dries into desert along some of the country’s most socioeconomically and politically vulnerable corridors. In both countries, environmental degradation is exacerbated by climate change, poor resource management, and conflict, representing a layer of vulnerability that reaches across many of the areas recognized as crucial to stability. In addition to water shortages, rising temperatures, land degradation, and greater climate volatility pose rising risks to livelihoods, health, and the viability of whole communities. Yet despite these gathering threats, environmental issues are often neglected in reconstruction processes, deprioritized by Yemeni and Iraqi powerbrokers and outside powers alike. Should environmental challenges remain unaddressed in the post-conflict period, they threaten to amplify the vulnerabilities created by conflict and the risks that factor among the drivers of tension and fragility. To read full analyses please click on Earth_AnalysisPaper