Downstream Areas at Risk

Downstream Areas at Risk

The UNEP report highlights the mounting pressure being put on freshwater areas around the world, which is radicallyaltering the way of life for people in the affected regions and threatening native wildlife.

Traditional Marsh Arab Village of Saigal

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The UNEP attributes the relatively rapid loss of the Mesopotamia marshlands to extensive damming upstream and drainage schemes implemented since the 1970s. More recently, a major factor contributing to the problem is a massive drainage works program installed in southern Iraq in the early 1990s.

The Tigris and the Euphrates are among the most heavily dammed rivers in the world. In the past 40 years, more than 30 large dams have been constructed on the two rivers.

Because the water stored in the reservoirs behind them is several times greater than the volume of both rivers, these dams have substantially reduced the water available for downstream ecosystems and eliminated the floodwaters that nourished the marshlands. Even the last patch of the once vast marshlands is at risk, scientists warn, as its water supply is held back by new dams and diverted for irrigation.

To save the remaining transboundary marsh, the UNEP is calling for Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran to develop a joint program to manage the dwindling water supply and halt further environmental damage.

You are the president of Iraq. You have been summoned by the head of UNEP to meet with leaders from Turkey and Syriato develop a joint program to manage the dwindling water supply of the Tigris and Euphrates and “halt further environmental damage.” You’ve been too busy dealing with the political situation to pay much attention to the environment—you don’t even know what the problem is. You certainly don’t have time to read every study that comes out. So you ask your staff to read all the reports and give you the executive summary—which is the main (central) idea of each report. You basically want to know all of the important information from each report in just one sentence. Anyone who can’t tell you the main idea is useless to you and will be fired.

The following are the sentences by members of his staff regarding the “Downstream Areas at Risk” section of the report. Which will be promoted (P)and given the responsibility of training others? Who will be retained to keep (K) doing the same job? Who will be fired (F)?

______This section is about how the areas downstream are at risk and how that can be very hard on some tribes and how things may be at risk.

_____ The UNEP study says marches are drying up because of extensive damming of the rivers upstream and draining of the marshes, causing indigenous people (Marsh Arabs) to leave and become refugees and causing many species of animals to lose their habitat and become extinct, and that Iraq, Syria and Turkey need to work together to solve the problem.

_____ How the disappearance of the water is affecting both the regions and native wildlife and how.

_____ The UNEP is calling for Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran to develop a program to halt loss of marshlands caused by extensive damming and draining and which is resulting in Marsh Arabs becoming refugees and is putting many species of wildlife at risk of extinction.

____ It’s about how the downstream areas are at risk.

_____ You block the source of a river, the river dries up at the bottom and everything in the river dries up, too.

_____ UNEP discovered that the marshlands in the Fertile Crescent are disappearing so humans and animals downstream are in danger.

____ The central idea of “Downstream Areas at Risk” is to show all the problems that damming has caused to the marshlands.

_____ The central idea of the section “Downstream Areas at Risk” is the effects of disappearance of marshland on people and animals.

Connections that meet or exceed standard:

I connected the ancient Fertile Crescent article to the tragedy of the commons because it relates to the topic of an area being over abused because either no one owns or several countries own one area and all have rights to it. Then when one area takes more, the others have to take just as extensive amounts to sustain themselves. And when everyone has rights to it, they all take from it and there is not enough left and the area is no longer usable. Eventually the area will become an unusable wasteland and none of these countries will profit from it.

I connected this article to Fishing for the Future where we learned how people are overfishing with trawlers. In this article we learned about how people are over-damming the Tigris/Euphrates rivers (connection!) The ocean where the boats fish is a free thing/resource, just like the rivers in the Fertile Crescent. Both of the cases are leading to extinction of some kind of animals. They both had a resource being overused enough to go away/not be usable any more. They both have something to do with things people are doing to endanger the earth’s wellbeing. They both had multiple countries trying to get a resource that there wasn’t really enough of for all of them. That said, those two articles are quite similar.

I connect this to “Just Add Water” because the Ataturk Dam is probably of the dams that the fertile crescent article was talking about as one of the causes of the disappearance of the marshes. The “Just Add Water” article was talking about how beneficial the Ataturk Dam is, and obviously it is to Turkey. Turkey just added 4.2 million acres that are irrigated from the dam, so that must take a lot of water out of the river. But it didn’t talk about the consequences downstream. On the other hand, the fertile crescent article talked about all the problems the dams are causing by draining the marshes downstream but didn’t say why the dams are there. The differences between these two articles show that it’s a very complicated transboundary problem, so I think it will be hard for all the countries to come up with a plan that benefits them all. Chapter 4 said that early city-states were in conflict over water, and I guess that part hasn’t changed over the last 5,000 years.

The Fertile Crescent reading is like the Hazda reading because they both include 2 problems of how the modern world is changing dramatically and causing the 2 communities to disappear. The Hadza are nomadic people, that live without rules, calendars and don’t grow food. They spend their days hunting-gathering food to survive, or taking care of kids and helping the community. Their way of living is slowly disappearing because people are using land to grow crops or build buildings/towns or cities! If they were to begin agriculture people wouldn’t be able to use the land because the Hadza own it. Meanwhile, the fertile crescent is having major climate problems which causes crops not to grow that much. This is caused by people who build too many dams. These issues are happening because the modern community is vastly changing!

I chose my connection on the “Rise of Sumerian City-States” because they both focus on the Fertile Crescent. The connection is very sad to me because first the Fertile Crescent was becoming a place to live, but now it is disappearing. In the chapter “The Rise of Sumerian City-States,” the Sumerian farmers began to make irrigation systems for their fields and they had to work together across village boundaries to control the water supply. Eventually, city-states were born. By controlling water, civilization was born. However, we see in the “Satellite Images Show Ancient Fertile Crescent Almost Gone” article that mankind has now controlled water too much. So rather than build cities, communities of people and animals are actually being destroyed. I hope that the countries of today will be able to work together again to try to help this problem.