Iraq’s climate migration linked with urbanization, inequality: IOM

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Water shortages and worsening quality in southern Iraq are driving migration of rural populations into “complex” urban settings where they face multiple social problems including financial hardships and difficulty accessing rights and safety, according to a study by the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM) published Thursday.

Thousands of Iraqis in recent years have been forced off their agricultural lands because of water problems and into urban areas like Basra that “already struggle with economic security and governance, and may not be well prepared to absorb influxes of migrants,” the IOM stated in a press release for the study.

The IOM study estimated that 12 percent of Basra city’s population are migrants and 49 percent of them moved because of water scarcity, and their migration is permanent as the majority of them sold their land and livestock.

Iraq has been named by the UN as the fifth-most vulnerable nation in the world country to the effects of climate change, especially rising temperatures and water shortages. This year, winter crops will be slashed by half because of water shortages and wheat production in Nineveh is expected to be down by 70 percent. Low precipitation and upstream dams in Turkey and Iran are drying out Iraq and increasing saline levels by as much 50-fold. In Basra, at least 118,000 people were hospitalized in 2018 because of unsafe drinking water, leading to protests.

In 2019, the IOM identified more than 21,000 people displaced in southern Iraq because of water issues.

“This climate-induced migration is made even more difficult when considering the wider degradation in economic security and governance that both rural and urban populations of the south continue to face,” the IOM study stated.

After violent protests in recent years over lack of government services, unemployment, and endemic corruption, “cities in the south of Iraq may not be well prepared to absorb this recent (and likely increasing) influx of population,” it added.

According to IOM, most migrant families depend on low-wage, informal employment and 53 percent say they cannot afford enough food or basic items. They largely live in rudimentary houses built on public land without permission or public infrastructure, “clustering in poorer, less formal, and less safe areas of the city.”

“The current social climate is similarly fragile and prone to eruption given the limited, ineffectual (or willfully passive) institutional responses to grievances up until now,” IOM stated, noting that local residents of Basra and migrants both feel neglected and marginalized.

Iraq is dependent on water sources that come from outside its borders. The water ministry signed an agreement with Turkey that came into force last week over sharing water. "One of the provisions of the agreement includes the launch of a fair and equitable quota for Iraq across the Tigris and Euphrates rivers," Minister Mehdi Al-Hamdani told state media.

Baghdad signed the Paris climate accord last year and one of the main issues it will focus on under the agreement is water security, Jassim al-Falahi, undersecretary of Iraq’s Ministry of Environment and Health, told Rudaw in an interview this summer.

Iraq’s climate migration linked with urbanization, inequality: IOM

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