Since 1989, international damming and the drainage of southern Iraqi marshes have collapsed fisheries, various forms of economic activity, and livestock and dairy production—activities that underpinned local livelihoods—turning a half-million former residents into internally displaced persons in extra-urban slums. Some have clustered along two rivers: the Shatt Al-Arab and the Shatt Al-Basra, where livestock can graze. Others bring livestock into the city and feed them reeds delivered from remaining marshes, exacerbating ecosystem collapse and urban water pollution. At the same time, massive wastewater outflows are dumped untreated into rivers emptying into the Gulf, killing fish and shellfish nurseries, with regional economic consequences.
“Establishing and Maintaining Riparian Rights in Constructed Wetlands in Southern Iraq” argues that constructed wetlands offer affordable, quickly implementable, integrated mitigation for many of these problems. They can restore services provided by pre-collapse marshes and help treat wastewater streams at a fraction of the cost of conventional treatment. A successful 2016 test case generated renewed interest in a constructed wetlands solution, which would need to be scaled up to the size of the problem. For a large-scale project to be successful, however, key stakeholders agree that establishing fair and transparent legal mechanisms for allocating grazing, harvesting, settlement, and management rights will be important.
Deficiencies in the rule of law present obstacles to such reforms. Iraq has a comprehensive legal framework for preventing, mitigating, remediating, and correcting environmental degradation, yet environmental degradation persists. Impediments to enforcement arise from problems with physical infrastructure, administrative infrastructure, and the fiscal structure of fines for violations.
Case studies of constructed wetlands from within and outside of the region—both successes and failures—provide valuable lessons for overcoming obstacles that Iraq faces within its existing regulatory structure. Such lessons may well be widely applicable world-wide, in arid delta zones threatened by water starvation and wetlands degradation.