SULAIMANI (ESTA) — The World Bank said Iraq could suffer a 20-percent drop in water resources by 2050 due to climate change.
Iraq has water shortages due to low rainfalls and restriction of water flows from Iran and Turkey.
The two neighboring countries are holding back water to fill reservoirs, a step that has alarmed Iraq and caused shortages in the country.
The water ministry said earlier this year that water flows from Iran and Turkey were reduced by 50 percent throughout the summer.
“Without action, water constraints will lead to large losses across multiple sectors of the economy and come to affect more and more vulnerable people,” World Bank’s Saroj Kumar Jha said in a statement accompanying a new report, according to AFP.
“By 2050, a temperature increase of one degree Celsius, and a precipitation decrease of 10 percent would cause a 20 percent reduction of available freshwater” in Iraq, the report said.
“Under these circumstances, nearly one-third of the irrigated land in Iraq will have no water by the year 2050.”
Economic modeling showed that “real GDP in Iraq could drop by up to 4 percent, or $6.6 billion compared to 2016 levels,” according to the report.
Demand for unskilled labor in the agricultural sector could fall by 11.8 percent, and by 5.4 percent for non-agricultural activities, AFP reported.
Water scarcity “is linked to small-scale forced displacement in Iraq”, the World Bank warned, particularly in the country’s south.
Iraq prepared a 20-year, $180-billion plan to manage its water crisis in 2014. But it was stillborn as Islamic State (ISIS) seized a third of the country the say year and money was diverted to fight the militants.
In 2018, financing for the water ministry accounted for less than 0.2 percent of the country’s overall budget, with just $15 million.
“The current state of infrastructure has led to salinity affecting approximately 60 percent of the cultivated land and a 30–60 percent reduction in yield,” the report said.
On a positive note, the World Bank said Iraq’s economic outlook had improved “on the back of the recovery of global oil markets”, adding its GDP was projected to grow from 2.6 percent this year to more than six percent in 2022–2023.
Iraq is mostly desert. Its inhabitable areas are fed by the Tigris from Turkey, the Euphrates from Turkey and Syria, and a network of rivers from Iran.
