اقرأ المحتوى باللغة العربية
Severe storms and flooding have wreaked havoc in Yemen since July, affecting over 560,000 people across the country and causing extensive damage to agriculture and infrastructure. Tens of thousands – including displaced persons – have been left without shelter and clean water in Ibb, Sana’a, Marib, Hudaydah, Al-Mahwit, and Taiz. While there is no final tally as yet of the hundreds of lives lost, now there is concern over the spread of waterborne diseases like cholera.
Dead bodies are being pulled out from rubble, under trees, or, in one case of a woman clutching her child in Melhan district in Al-Mahwit governorate, buried in mud – a haunting image that captures the weight of this tragedy. The extreme downpours have even disrupted Houthi military plans, ruining tunnels and trenches in coastal regions, but more importantly, moving landmines that could remain unrecoverable for decades to come.
The summer rains are another example of the extreme weather events that tend to devastate the countries least able to manage them, yet have become all too familiar in Yemen. But this year the rains have struck at a particularly inopportune moment. Frontline fighting may have eased, but the eruption of the Gaza war and the escalation of Houthi attacks in the Red Sea have sunk the country further into political division, economic deterioration, and a deep sense of drift.
Making matters worse, humanitarian work has become increasingly difficult in light of the ongoing Houthi campaign of arrests against Yemeni employees working for international and local organizations and the US sanctions reimposed on the Houthis because of the Red Sea attacks. The Yemeni government remains riven with factional disputes. Energies are still focused on the political fall-out of a row over banking policies while President Rashad al-Alimi tries to re-establish his authority with high-profile trips to Taiz and Hadramawt, and Saudi Arabia works to keep hope alive of an eventual settlement with the Houthis. The international community is busy with Houthi attacks on Israel and commercial shipping
The lack of international concern offers a stark illustration of how much Yemen’s socioeconomic well-being has slipped down the global agenda. Given the fact that the country is currently at the center of a regional geopolitical storm, this might seem odd. But the domestic dysfunction is simply encouraging the world’s worst instincts to view Yemen purely as a security problem to be managed and then move on.
Central government neglect may be at its most blatant, but in truth, it stretches back years. Climate experts were sounding alarm bells in the 1980s about the devastating impact of new rain patterns – heavy one year, drought the next – that were ruining the famed irrigated terraces of Yemen’s western highland region, leading to massive spills of water cascading all the way down through the mountain valleys to the Tihama plain below. Deforestation and a youth exodus to the cities compounded the problem, helping turn a lush ecosystem into a wasteland in a matter of years, as captured in an arresting British documentary made in 1990.
What efforts there were in the intervening years to mitigate the damage have been spoiled by war. The conflict of the past decade intensified trends seen over recent decades, increasing costs for seeds, fertilizers, and farming equipment, forcing people to abandon their lands for other professions, with the added pressures of massive internal displacement and use of landmines. It also caused regular fuel shortages, leading to more deforestation while tree-planting programs in water catchment areas were effectively abandoned.
Yemen needs to revive traditional practices of irrigation, indigenous water harvesting systems, and tree-planting, but that can only be done through “community-driven systems rooted in local knowledge.” The best thing political authorities can do now is empower the local communities inside Yemen’s unique geographies by providing them with the resources to apply their knowledge independently. As the existing power in the northern highlands, the Houthis can also make a significant difference by launching a massive program of reforestation.
Once again it becomes painfully clear that the environment must rise up the list of donor priorities for Yemen, which would engender a sense of responsibility for meeting the needs of flood victims. UN climate change conferences have already broadly identified the importance of climate change, creating a special fund for developing countries, and now Yemeni leaders need to press the case more effectively for their country’s precedence.
Yemen’s cultural heritage is also at risk. During the recent extreme rainfall, part of the Himyarite Shammar Yahrash fortress in Al-Bayda collapsed, the northern facade of the historic Zabid Castle in Hudaydah was damaged, and a number of houses in the Old City of Sana’a, boasting some of the oldest mud and stone vernacular architecture in the world, are looking vulnerable. Both the government and Houthis have put out an urgent appeal for help, since the loss of these structures, many of which are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, threatens to erode not only Yemen’s history but the country’s cultural identity itself.
Ultimately, the fundamental issue to be stressed is justice. The poorest people in the poorest countries are paying a price not just for the progress of advanced economies, but for the ineptitude of leaders they had no role in choosing. With these latest floods, relative disregard for the climate question after a decade of war has come back to haunt Yemen’s ruling authorities, and public anger is rising as a result. Local communities know how to act, if only governments can get their act together to back them up.