SULAIMANI (ESTA) — Iraq’s water resources have plunged 50 percent since last year due to drought, low rainfall and declining river levels, AFP cited a government official as saying on Thursday.
“Water resources are far lower than what we had last year, by about 50 percent because of poor rainfall and the quantities arriving from neighboring countries,” Aoun Dhiabi, a senior adviser at the water resources ministry, told AFP.
Iraq is classified as one of the world’s five countries most vulnerable to climate change and desertification.
Iraq’s main sources of water are the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, providing 98% of the country’s surface water.
Both rivers originate in Turkey, while the Euphrates passes through Syria, and some tributaries flow through Iran.
Turkey and Iran are holding back water to fill reservoirs behind dams which both countries have built in the past years.
The country has often protested that their upstream construction of dams has endangered its water resources.
The ministry’s senior adviser also pinned the blame on “the successive years of drought: 2020, 2021 and 2022,” according to AFP.
“This serves as a warning on how we must use [water resources] in the summer and next winter. We have to take these factors into account in our planning for the agriculture sector,” he said.
In November, the World Bank warned that Iraq, a country of 41 million people, could suffer a 20-percent decline in drinking water resources by 2050 due to climate change.
