A month after Pakistan’s worst flood in 80 years, millions remain without access to food, clean water, or health care.

The Middle East is home to some of the fastest growing, most resource-scarce, and conflict-affected countries in the world. New Security Beat’s “Middle East at the Crossroads” series takes a look at the most challenging population, health, environment, and security issues facing the region.

Across the Middle East, sustained population growth has strained government institutions, natural resources, and the social fabric of entire societies. In Syria, these problems have been particularly acute.

With a total fertility rate of 3.3 children per woman and a population growth rate of 2.45 percent, the country is slated to swell from 22.5 million people to 28.6 million by 2025, and upward to 36.9 million by mid-century, according to the Population Reference Bureau.

“We have a population problem, no question,” acknowledged Syrian economist and former World Bank official Nabil Sukkar in a recent interview with Reuters. “Unless we cope with it, it could be a burden to our development.”

One of the biggest population problems threatening to derail Syria’s continued development is the scarcity of clean fresh water, which has troubling implications for both the security of the country and the region, since Syria shares key transboundary waterways, like the Euphrates River, with neighbors Iraq and Turkey.

As Syria grows more crowded, can Damascus find a way to encourage more efficient management and sustainable use of the country’s water? Or is greater conflict over the resource at home and in the neighborhood inevitable?

From Water Rich to Water Scarce

Historically, Syria has enjoyed plentiful groundwater resources and water from a number of rivers. Even today, Syria typically receives more annual precipitation per capita than seven other Arab nations, placing Syria 13th on a list of 20 released by the UN Development Programme’s 2009 Arab Human Development Report.

However, rapid demographic change, coupled with a series of severe droughts since 2006, has made life considerably more difficult for many Syrians. According to the UN, erratic rainfall in recent years has reduced Syria’s surface water supplies, inducing crop failures and livestock losses, and nudging millions — especially those involved in subsistence farming — into “extreme poverty.” In particular, wheat production has been hit hard, weakening the country’s food security and pushing farmers to migrate to urban centers.

Heading Underground

To cope with the drought, large- and small-scale farmers alike have increased their reliance on groundwater. But in a country where 90 percent of all water withdrawals are used for agriculture, Syria’s efforts are placing a huge strain on its aquifer health. And despite appearances, it’s not just the drought: Syria’s groundwater depletion problems have spanned decades, mirroring its population growth.

According to Syria’s National Agricultural Policy Center (NAPC), the number of wells tapping aquifers nationwide is thought to have swelled from just over 135,000 in 1999 to more than 213,000 in 2007. The rampant pumping — much of it illegal — has caused groundwater levels to plummet in many parts of the country, and raised significant concerns about the water quality in remaining aquifer stocks.

And demand continues to rise: NAPC reports that the amount of land irrigated by groundwater soared from roughly 650,000 hectares in 1985 to 1.4 million hectares in 2005, a trend that has only accelerated in the face of recent rainfall shortages.
Drawing down aquifers is worrisome as long as withdrawals outpace natural recharge. Some, known as “fossil aquifers,” lack natural inputs or outlets and will never refill — once drained, these aquifers are gone for good.

Avoiding the Hard Choices

For decades, Damascus did little to acknowledge or address the country’s growing problem of aquifer overuse. Government officials shied away from implementing robust policies that would have metered, taxed, or even simply monitored groundwater usage. In lieu of encouraging water-use conservation in the agricultural sector, Syria’s water managers instead focused on manipulating supply, by constructing dams or proposing plans to shuttle water between river basins. In doing so, they largely avoided imposing water austerity measures that almost certainly would have proven politically unpopular.

Belatedly, some efforts to mitigate Syria’s water issues are now underway. The country’s 2005 water-use code called for the licensing of all the country’s wells, threatening fines or prison terms for those caught illegally pumping groundwater. In 2008, Damascus took its campaign one step further, eliminating diesel subsidies that once facilitated groundwater removal.

But while these efforts have had some positive effect on groundwater-use trends nationwide, they could undermine stability in the short term. Illegal wells facilitate crop growth in many areas and help employ thousands in the agricultural sector, so shutting them down could heighten regional unemployment, and further weaken the country’s food security.

There Goes the Neighborhood?

With the future of Syria’s groundwater uncertain, there has been speculation that these internal water tensions might increase competition with neighboring countries for transboundary surface waters. The two countries most inextricably linked to Syria’s water crunch are Iraq and Turkey, who share the Euphrates with Syria.

Syria pulls roughly 85 percent of its water from the Euphrates, making the river a vital strategic resource. Yet water availability has historically been subject to the whims of Turkey, which controls the Euphrates’ headwaters.

Meanwhile, Iraq, which lies downstream of Syria, is also heavily dependant on the river. Understandably, as all three countries have seen their populations grow in recent decades, so too have tensions over controlling and sharing the Euphrates’ flow.

Despite Turkey’s long-standing resistance to international water-sharing pacts and penchant for large-scale hydroelectric projects, a new round of water diplomacy may help ease future tensions over the river. A recently created joint institute — backed by Iraq, Syria, and Turkey — is designed to provide a forum for the three countries to share data and policy ideas. Academics and water experts from the three countries will collaborate on efficient management, share best practices, and create a comprehensive map of the region’s water supplies.

The institute may be only a small step, but its emphasis on transparency is undoubtedly a move in the right direction. For Syria — sandwiched between two much larger countries — better communication with its neighbors is not only smart, but necessary to avoid conflict. But that won’t solve the country’s serious water scarcity problem. Leaders in Damascus should also continue to encourage conservation and more efficient use of water to stretch supplies to meet the needs of their growing population.

Sources: BBC, Global Arab Network, IRIN, Mideastnews.com, National Agricultural Policy Centre (Syria), Population Reference Bureau, Reuters, Syria Ministry of Agriculture, Syria Today

Photo Credit: “Euphrates and the Dig House Dura Europos,” courtesy of flickr user Verity Cridland.

Excerpted from the original version of this article on Slate, by James Fleming.

Is there a technological fix for global warming? Where would we put a “planetary thermostat,” and who would control the settings? The long and tragicomic history of fixing the sky — of rainmakers, rain fakers, weather warriors, and climate engineers — indicates that such ideas are far-fetched. Dosing the stratosphere with sulfuric acid to turn the blue sky milky-white does not sound like a good idea. Neither does dumping an iron slurry into the oceans to fill them with algae and turn them soupy-green. A global forest of artificial trees? Storing massive amounts of carbon dioxide under our feet forever? A flotilla of ships pumping seawater into the clouds? Unlikely, unlikely, unlikely.

Global climate engineering is untested and untestable, and dangerous beyond belief. The famous mathematician and computer pioneer John von Neumann warned against it in 1955. Responding to U.S. fantasies about weaponizing the weather and Soviet proposals to modify the Arctic and rehydrate Siberia, he expressed concern over “rather fantastic effects” on a scale difficult to imagine and impossible to predict. Tinkering with the Earth’s heat budget or the atmosphere’s general circulation, he claimed, “will merge each nation’s affairs with those of every other more thoroughly than the threat of a nuclear or any other war may already have done.” In his opinion, attempts at weather and climate control could disrupt natural and social relations and produce forms of warfare as yet unimagined. It could alter the entire globe and shatter the existing political order.

Continue reading on Slate.

James Fleming is an environmental historian and Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Colby College. ECSP and the Wilson Center will be hosting the launch of his new book, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control, on October 6, 2010.

Photo Credit: Adapted from “Lever du jour,” courtesy of flickr user Solea20.

Here are some useful links to environment, population, and security work that recently crossed my desk.

• NYU’s Richard Gowan dissects UK development minister Andrew Mitchell’s encouraging speech identifying conflict-affected states as special DFID priorities. Gowan pulls out highlights from the speech and parses NGO reaction to it on Global Dashboard.

• Council on Foreign Relations’ Isobel Coleman provides five practical suggestions for tapping into women as the “new global growth engine,” on Forbes.

• The Aspen Institute announced its Global Leaders Council for Reproductive Health this week. Their goal: meeting unmet demand for family planning services by 2015 on the MDG schedule. That is over 200,000,000 women who want services but do not have access.

• I’m heartened to see the U.S. Senate pass the Senator Paul Simon Water for the World Act. Hoping the House will follow suit. Last time Congress passed legislation on water, sanitation, and health priorities, the 2005 Senator Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support.

• Colby historian Jim Fleming, writing in Slate, puts the increasing fascination with geoengineering as a climate response “option” in some sobering historical context. “Weather as a Weapon: The Troubling History of Geoengineering” is the short read. Tune in to hear Jim present the book length version, Fixing the Sky, at the Wilson Center, October 6th at 10:30 am EST.

Follow Geoff Dabelko (@geoffdabelko) and The New Security Beat (@NewSecurityBeat) on Twitter for more population, health, environment, and security updates.

This summer, Secretary Clinton gave a speech at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Hanoi that Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi called “in effect an attack on China.” What did Clinton say that prompted such a direct response? She called for negotiations over the rights to resource extraction in the South China Sea to be multilateral rather than bilateral:

Iraq’s Southern Marshes, once the Middle East’s largest and most ecologically diverse wetlands, have survived the Iran-Iraq war, systematic drainage by Saddam Hussein, American invasion, and record-breaking drought. Today, however, the prospects for survival are dimming, as water consumption across the region continues to increase and security remains unsettled. Despite these challenges, the marshes’ location along the Iranian border and their reliance on flow from Turkey upstream offers unique potential for environmental peacemaking in this troubled region.

Here are some useful links to environment, population, and security work that recently crossed my desk.

• Need a break from the raging debate set off by Halvard Buhaug’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences quantitative-based critique of climate and African civil war linkages (or lack thereof)? Check out some of the correlations Cullen Hendrix and Idean Salehyan of University of North Texas find in their piece “After the Rain: Rainfall Variability, Hydro-Meteorological Disasters, and Social Conflict in Africa.”

• A German military think tank report worries about the economic and political implications of peak oil over a relatively short time frame.

• Militaries’ humanitarian responses to extreme weather events rather than actual shooting wars are the focus of “The Coming Conflicts of Climate Change,” by U.S. Navy Foreign Area Officer Michael Baker. Baker is writing for the Council on Foreign Relations as one of their International Affairs Fellows.

• Oxfam America and IUCN staff experts call for greater consideration of different gender roles in addressing climate change. UN climate institutions are targeted in the IPS story.

• Journalist Steve Solomon highlights the high politics of transboundary water in Asia with a piece in Forbes. China’s control of the Tibetan water tower with massive dam building amps up the pressure in South and Southeast Asia.

• Canadian scholar Eric Kaufmann’s book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? breaks down relative population growth rates between the religious and the secular. One is high, one is below replacement level. So far the book is only published in Europe but you can get it from Amazon UK.

• The highly respected science journal Nature editorializes against the rising tide of loud anti-science demagoguery. Strong words on the U.S. political context.

Follow Geoff Dabelko (@geoffdabelko) and The New Security Beat (@NewSecurityBeat) on Twitter for more population, health, environment, and security updates.

The Middle East is home to some of the fastest growing, most resource-scarce, and conflict-affected countries in the world. New Security Beat’s “Middle East at the Crossroads” series takes a look at the most challenging population, health, environment, and security issues facing the region.

Yemen is one of the most kinetic intersections of human and environmental security in the world. At the tip of the Arabian Peninsula, it is a natural gateway for those fleeing hardship in the conflict-wracked Horn of Africa, but observers are concerned it may soon resemble something much less than a haven.

Increased local resistance to a corrupt regime in Sanaa and an influx of Al Qaeda influence recently caused the CIA to reassess the franchise in Yemen as a more urgent threat to national security than the core Al Qaeda elements in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In addition to these traditional security challenges, Yemen faces a bevy of population and environment-related problems. With its 22.8 million people, Yemen is growing faster than any other country in the Middle East – by 2050, it will rival Spain in total population. It is home to nearly a million impoverished migrants from East Africa, is almost totally reliant on groundwater that is being drained faster than can naturally be replenished, has an unemployment rate approaching 40 percent, the lowest rating in the world for gender equity, and almost no source of income besides oil exports, which have declined 56 percent since 2001 and are expected to continue sliding, barring any major new discoveries.

Beyond its more covert commitments, the United States has pledged over $210 million to Yemen for military, economic, and development assistance for this year alone. Is it enough to stave off collapse in one of the Middle East’s most troubled states?

For more see The New Security Beat’s full feature, “Demographics, Depleted Resources, and Al Qaeda Inflame Tensions in Yemen,” published earlier this summer.

Sources: Associated Press, Association for the Study of Peak Oil – USA, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington Post.

Photo Credit: Adapted from “Old Town Sanaa – Yemen 53,” courtesy of flickr user Richard Messenger.