Environmental issues in the Middle East

Garbage piled up on a sewage plant property in Dubai. Sewage treatment operations have struggled to keep up with booming development.

 Dubai’s skyline is the most sparkling in the Middle East. But down on the ground, the environmental problems of a quickly erected city built on sand look a lot less alluring. In the last year, tourists have swum amid raw sewage in Dubai’s slice of the Persian Gulf. The purifying of seawater to feed taps and fountains is raising salinity levels. despite sitting on vast oil reserves, the region is running out of energy sources to support its rich lifestyle. Rapid growth has produced other problems as well, including sewage treatment operations that have struggled to keep up with development. Dubai’s biggest challenge is water, which may be everywhere in the gulf but is undrinkable without desalination plants. Meanwhile, hundreds of skyscrapers were built with water and electricity as afterthoughts; environmental standards were rarely applied.

Water stress is at its most extreme in the Middle East and North Africa.

 Is the Middle East running dry? The Middle East and north Africa (Mena), currently in the middle of a historic wave of unrest, is by far the worst affected region. Of the 16 nations suffering extreme water stress, according to risk analysts Maple croft, every single one is in the Mena region. Bahrain tops the list of those using far more water than they sustainably receive. The most water-stressed nations on Earth are all in the Middle East and North Africa. Add surging populations and food and energy costs, and trouble seems inevitable

The deforestation in the Middle East

 The environmental issues in the Middle East don’t receive as much attention as they should. Regions such as North and South America, Africa, and Asia have much more help and attention, even though the Middle East has problems of equal value.

 These are, by far, the largest marshlands in the Middle East and they happen to reside in Iraq. the drainage and destruction of these marshlands, according to the United Nations Environmental Program, has caused a decrease in bird population in areas such as Ukraine and the Caucasus and the extinction of seven different natural plant and animal species from the marshlands. Other results are loss of soil salinity in the Marshes. This has deprived Iraq of crucial agricultural land and has caused the loss of dairy production, fishing, and rice cultivation in the region. The drainage and destruction has also caused the desertification of 7,500 square miles and increased salt water intrusion and increased overflow of pollutants into the Shatt-al-Arab waterway, causing disruption of fisheries in the Persian Gulf.

Cooperation Project in the Middle East With rising economic strains on one side and ever more environmental concerns on the other, the world could soon find itself in "the perfect global storm", the World Economic Forum warned in a report on Tuesday. The sustainability of the new booming Dubai is a worry for environmentalists. In recent global analysis of ecological resource use, the UAE came top as the least environmentally friendly country owing to its heavy reliance on air conditioning and desalinated water just to survive (in the summer it can be more than 40 degrees Celsius outside).