A multitude of factors will affect the water supply of the world: pollution, climate change, politics, and geoengineering is just a partial list. As the world population continues to grow, most of these factors will also grow, exacerbating the situation:
- Pollution contaminates water;
- Climate change causes some bodies of water to grow, while others shrink; and just as importantly, the composition of that water can change;
- Politics can result in the control of the supply of water flowing from one entity to another to be manipulated to achieve political goals
- Geoengineering, the building of dams, levees, and other structures to control a water supply can have side effects seen and unseen: think of the Aral Sea, a victim of Soviet hunger for cotton, and now a drought.
And water is one of the two most critical substances for survival, so when supplies become constrained, tensions can build. A facet of this situation in Brazil has already been covered in an earlier post, where NewScientist reports that the prospect of dams on the Amazon may be reduced as scientists predict that the mere act of building dams may result in their becoming ineffective.
In Iran, on the eastern border with Afghanistan, the situation is degenerating, not improving. As reported by Bloomberg’s Golnar Motevalli, one of Iran’s largest lakes is rapidly disappearing, leaving the locals in deep trouble:
A decade ago, the three lakes comprising Hamoun’s wetlands covered 5,600 square kilometers, the size of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. They served 420,000 people, two cities and 935 villages, EPO says. Today, only a few shallow patches of water remain.
The drying has almost doubled seasonal dust and sandstorms from 120 days a year to 220 days, increasing respiratory, heart and intestinal illnesses and rates of cancer, according to a 2014 report published by EPO and the United Nations.
It’s a fate mirroring that of Urmia, 2,100 kilometers to the west. Once the Middle East’s largest saltwater lake, it’s now 20 percent of its former size. Salt-infused winds blowing across barren sections are causing “serious” local health problems, according to the UN Development Programme.
Iran links the Hamouns’ problems to Afghanistan, urging its war-stricken neighbor to control irrigation of the Helmand River that starts in the Hindu Kush mountains and traverses agrarian provinces before reaching the border.
An Iran government report about the Hamouns says increased irrigation, diversion of water for crops, population growth and largely U.S.-funded projects including the Kajaki Dam started reducing flows to Sistan-Baluchestan in the 1950s.
Efforts to reach a water-management pact on the border date to the 1970s. Talks revived in the mid-2000s, a few years after after the Taliban government was deposed. They stalled again in 2008 when Afghanistan refused to endorse a UN-backed proposal from Iran to save the Hamouns.
It’s an explosive region within Iran, and now its water supply is imperiled. It’s difficult to blame the Iranian government with the chaos that has infested Afghanistan for decades. There’s little the United States, or indeed anyone but the two involved parties, can do, beyond mediation. Perhaps that could be an opening for Obama or his successors: find a way to help in this area. Unremitting hostility is not always a workable strategy.
(h/t Mohammad Ali Shabani, AL Monitor)
