The U.S. government’s recent donation of $13.5 million to support the United Nations’ World Food Program operations in Yemen epitomizes U.S. and other western nations’ concerns with Yemen’s deteriorating natural resources. As its resources deteriorate, the Yemeni government is facing growing threats to its national security. The growing presence of Al-Qaeda and other extremists, the Houthi rebellion in the north of the country, and an increasingly hostile protest movement, all spurred by lack of access to basic goods, threaten to make large swaths of the country, if not the entire nation, ungovernable.

Although some of these issues are attributable to mismanagement by the Yemeni government or the government’s lack of military equipment, other factors, including climate change, play a significant role. Yemen’s rapidly diminishing water resources are one example of how climate change, exacerbated by poor resource management, is contributing to national and regional instability in Yemen and the Middle East.

BACKGROUND

The forecasts for Yemen’s water supply are uniformly dire. Negatively affected by drought and shifting weather patterns, annual water consumption per capita, at 200 cubic meters, is 80 percent below the water poverty line of 1000 cubic meters. The country’s capital, Sana’a, whose 7% annual population growth rate is the highest of any nation’s capital in the world, is expected to run out of economically viable water supplies by 2017, the same year the World Bank predicts Yemen will cease earning income from its oil, which accounts for three-quarters of the country’s annual income. The options for replacing the city’s expired water supply are as stark as the problem – pump desalinated water from the ocean up 2,000 meters to the capital; transfer water from a nearby basin separated from Sana’a by mountains; or move the capital elsewhere.

Weather patterns often associated with the effects of climate change have accelerated Yemen’s water woes. An unusually long drought has left 19 of the country’s 21 aquifers permanently dry. The climate-based challenges Yemen faces do not end with access to freshwater. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ranked the Yemeni port city of Aden sixth among twenty-five cities vulnerable to rising sea levels. Rising sea levels can contaminate water supplies, damage infrastructure, and make portions of coastal cities uninhabitable because of regular flooding or submersion.

Aware of its environmental vulnerabilities, the Yemeni government has acted to combat climate change. During the first Earth Summit in 1992, Yemen became party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was internationally implemented in 1994. Yemen’s accession to the Kyoto Protocol was approved in September 2004. Since then, the Yemeni government has consistently supported efforts to responsibly manage Yemen’s water supply. In 2008, the government unveiled a plan to gather and harvest 70 percent of rainwater by 2012 in Sana’a. According to the plan, other parts of the country would collect 40 percent of rainwater by 2020.

Yet the Yemeni government’s initiatives have yet to bare substantive fruit. Fund-raising efforts by the international community to support Yemen’s strategy have yet to meet fundraising goals. Even money raised and dispensed has had little effect or affect on the Yemeni government’s efforts to contain the multiple violent movements throughout the country that threaten to plunge the country into chaos before its wells run dry. A collapsed Yemen would be problematic for the region, creating a sanctuary for extremist movements adjacent to the region’s leading oil producer, Saudi Arabia.

ANALYSIS

Substantive action on climate change is unlikely to occur before Yemen’s water crisis becomes significantly worse. The solution to the country’s water problems must begin with reform of water usage by its agricultural sector. This requires re-allocating water away from the thirsty plants of the qat leaf, a mild narcotic that consumes 40 percent of Yemen’s water and is chewed by approximately 70 percent of Yemeni men. Yemen’s leaders must find the rhetoric and cultivate the constituencies that will permit this culturally sensitive transition to occur with a minimum of conflict.

But the scope of Yemen’s resource and security problems are such that the Yemeni government cannot act alone to improve its stewardship of water and other climate change-affected resources. Support from the international community is essential. Yemen should work most closely with the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, especially wealthy Saudi Arabia, which has a vital national interest in ensuring Yemen does not become ungovernable. Even as it addresses its short-term problems, the Yemeni government must continue to pursue long-term solutions, both on climate change through diplomatic means, and on water usage through research and development. In this way, it will ensure a sustainable solution to the problems that threaten its ability to govern.

Marc A. Sorel is Middle East Regional Editor at Foreign Policy Digest.

http://www.foreignpolicydigest.org/Middle-East/September-2010/yemen-climate-change.html