Iraqis Displaced by Climate Change Fall Into Poverty

Date: 22 November 2023 - 21:45

News ID: ۱۲۱۷۵۹

NASIRIYAH (AFP) – For the past decade, Nasser Jabbar and his children have lived in a rundown house built of grey concrete blocks at a shantytown in southern Iraq.
Drought chased the father of 10 out of the countryside, where he had been a herder and farmer, and into a life of unemployment and urban poverty.
“We lost the land, and we lost the water,” said the father in his 40s, wearing a traditional white robe.
He spoke to AFP in his home on the edges of Nasiriyah, capital of Dhi Qar province.
Jabbar’s neighborhood typifies the extreme poverty that those displaced by climate change face in south and central Iraq.
With declining rainfall, the country has seen four consecutive years of drought.
In the shantytown where he lives, cracked streets lined with rubble and piles of rubbish snake between houses thrown together by their inhabitants.
On an empty lot surrounded by ramshackle buildings, sewers empty onto open ground as cows rest in the shadow of a low wall nearby.
Like Jabbar, many of the displaced who live here abandoned their villages after a life working in agriculture.
In the old days in Gateia, Jabbar’s village in Dhi Qar, he farmed five hectares (just over 12 acres) of land with his brothers.
In winter, they harvested barley; in summer, vegetables.
Before leaving his fields behind for the last time, Jabbar did what he could for four years to combat the onward march of an increasingly inhospitable climate.
He dug a well, but ‘little by little the water dropped’, and he had to sell off his herd of 50 goats one by one.
Once in the city, he found work on construction sites carrying bricks or mixing concrete, but had to stop in the end because of back problems.
“I haven’t worked for three years,” he said.
Now two of his children, aged 17 and 18, support the family by carrying goods to market, earning a little less than four dollars a day.
By mid-September, “21,798 families (130,788 individuals) remain displaced because of drought conditions across 12 governorates” in central and southern Iraq, an International Organization for Migration report said.
According to the IOM, 74 percent of climate refugees resettle in urban areas.
Dhi Qar’s deputy governor in charge of planning, Ghassan al-Khafaji, noted “significant internal migration” in the province, sparked by water shortages.
In five years “3,200 housing units were built on the outskirts of the city” of Nasiriyah, as a result of an exodus from Iraq’s famed southern marshes which have been assailed by drought.
Those houses account for “between 20,000 and 25,000 people”, Khafaji added.