Drought is drying up Iraq’s Mesopotamian marshes for the fourth year in a row.
The marsh water gets so salty that it starts killing buffaloes that drink it. Many of Mohammed Hamid Nour’s herd died like this. He had to sell others before they perished too.
“If the drought continues and the government doesn’t help us, the others will also die,” said the 23-year-old herder.
The Mesopotamian marshes, and the culture of those who live in them, have Unesco world heritage status. These people have hunted and fished there for 5,000 years.
But the marshlands have shrunk from 20,000 square kilometres in the early 1990s to 4,000 in recent years. This is because of dams on the rivers upstream in Turkey and Syria, as well as the soaring temperatures of climate change.
In Iraq, rainfall is becoming increasingly rare, and temperatures are predicted to go up by 2.5 degrees on average in the next 25 years.
