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WATER POLITICS

Via Australia’s The National, a reprint of Thomas Friedman’s comments on the impact of environmental pressures on recent political uprisings:

The Arab awakening was driven not only by political and economic stresses, but, less visibly, by environmental, population and climate stresses.

ISN’T it interesting that the Arab awakening began in Tunisia with a fruit vendor who was harassed by police for not having a permit to sell food – just at the moment when world food prices hit record highs?

And that it began in Syria with farmers in the southern village of Daraa, who were demanding the right to buy and sell land near the border, without having to get permission from corrupt security officials?

And that it was spurred on in Yemen – the first country in the world expected to run out of water – by a list of grievances against an incompetent government, among the biggest of which was that top officials were digging water wells in their own backyards at a time when the government was supposed to be preventing such water wildcatting?

As Abdelsalam Razzaz, the Water Minister in Yemen’s new government, told Reuters last week: ”The officials themselves have traditionally been the most aggressive well diggers. Nearly every minister had a well dug at his house.”

All these tensions over land, water and food are telling us something: The Arab awakening was driven not only by political and economic stresses, but, less visibly, by environmental, population and climate stresses. If we focus only on the former, and not the latter, we will never be able to help stabilise these societies.

Take Syria. ”Syria’s current social unrest is, in the most direct sense, a reaction to a brutal and out-of-touch regime,” write Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell in a report for their Centre for Climate and Security in Washington. ”However, that’s not the whole story. The past few years have seen a number of significant social, economic, environmental and climatic changes in Syria that have eroded the social contract between citizen and government.”

From 2006 to 2011, they note, up to 60 per cent of Syria’s land experienced one of the worst droughts and the most severe set of crop failures in its history. The United Nations reported that more than 800,000 Syrians had their livelihoods wiped out by these droughts, and many were forced to move to the cities to find work – adding to the burdens of already incompetent government.

”If climate projections stay on their current path, the drought situation in North Africa and the Middle East is going to get progressively worse, and you will end up witnessing cycle after cycle of instability that may be the impetus for future authoritarian responses,” argues Femia.

An analysis by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, published last October in the Journal of Climate, found that droughts in winter in the Middle East – when the region traditionally gets most of its rainfall to replenish aquifers – are increasing, and human-caused climate change is partly responsible.

”The magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone,” noted Martin Hoerling, of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, the lead author of the paper. ”This is not encouraging news … because it implies natural variability alone is unlikely to return the region’s climate to normal.”

Especially when you consider the other stresses. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, the executive director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development in London, writing in Beirut’s The Daily Star in February, pointed out that 13 of the world’s 15 most water-scarce countries – Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Israel and Palestine – are in the Middle East, and after three decades of explosive population growth these countries are ”set to dramatically worsen their predicament”.

A British Defence Ministry study has projected that by 2030 the population of the Middle East will increase by 132 per cent. A lot more mouths to feed with less water than ever.

As Lester Brown, the president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of World on the Edge, notes: 20 years ago, using oil-drilling technology, the Saudis tapped into an aquifer far below the desert to produce irrigated wheat, making themselves self-sufficient. But now almost all that water is gone, and Saudi wheat production is, too.

So the Saudis are investing in farmland in Ethiopia and Sudan, but that means they will draw more Nile water for irrigation away from Egypt, whose agriculture-rich Nile Delta is already vulnerable to any sea level rise and saltwater intrusion.

”If you ask, ‘What are the real threats to our security today’,” said Brown, ”at the top of the list would be climate change, population growth, water shortages, rising food prices and the number of failing states in the world. As that list grows, how many failed states before we have a failing global civilisation, and everything begins to unravel?”

Hopefully, we won’t go there. But, then, we should all remember that quote attributed to Leon Trotsky: ”You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Well, you may not be interested in climate change, but climate change is interested in you.