How does the drying up of wetlands affect everyone’s life?
Harm to nature will not be cheap for humans, and the drying up of these wetlands will have far-reaching consequences.
According to ISNA, the Iranian newspaper wrote: “Iran’s wetlands are being destroyed like a historical monument and there is no hope of reviving this dead man.” These are the words of Mohammad Ali Yekta Nik, an environmental activist who speaks with pain. The image of the dry bed of Hamoon wetland or the death of the buffaloes of Hur al-Azim wetland does not matter. Drought and mismanagement of water resources no longer have mercy on any wetland. Now, more than 2800 wetlands, which are one of the natural resources and environmental assets of Iran, are not as good as all the people who used these wetlands as natural capital for years and maybe centuries; Like all living things and life cycles that formed along these lagoons. But harming nature will not be cheap for humans, and the drying up of these wetlands will have far-reaching consequences.
Various assessments over the years have shown that Iran’s wetlands are experiencing worse conditions every day. There are three million hectares of wetlands in Iran, one and a half million hectares of which are registered in the Ramsar Convention, which is one of the oldest international environmental treaties. Wetlands that have existed for thousands of years and thanks to their existence, civilization, culture and human communities have been formed. Many men fished in it and many women created handicrafts alongside it. The drying up of wetlands will bring with it poverty, and people who are tired of empty tables will think of migrating, as we have seen in recent years with large-scale migration to large cities and the expansion of suburbanization.
“Wetlands have 18 times more role in the ecosystem than forests.” Yekta Nik considers the disappearance of various biological and food cycles as one of the consequences of the disappearance of wetlands. He believes that people living, farming or animal husbandry around the wetlands will also experience a difficult time as a result of this drought. As we have seen in the recent paragraph in Khuzestan, the people whose only livelihood was animal husbandry, what happened to their cattle in the absence of Hur al-Azim water. “The wetland environment balances the climatic conditions,” says the environmental activist. These wetlands maintain relative humidity and are very important in controlling storms, winds and floods. Reedbeds also play an important role in breaking the wind whip or preventing floods.
The decrease in relative humidity that occurs following the destruction of wetlands contributes to a drier environment, and this cycle also causes more losses. “In saline wetlands such as Bakhtegan and Urmia, clouds become infertile due to chlorine ions, which are released by evaporation in the atmosphere, and this contributes to the dryness of the environment.”
In the meantime, what happens to the animals whose life depends on the dynamics of the wetlands? You may ask yourself, what does it matter what animals do when so many people are in so much trouble? Yekta Nik believes that just as the life of wild species is an indicator of the health of nature and the environment and our lives, their removal is also an indicator of the extinction of life. “It must be said that something very bad is happening because we know tens of cycles and we do not know many, and the elimination of these biological food cycles will disrupt the order of nature.”
“If Lake Urmia dries up, between 6 and 20 million people will migrate, and the dust and sediments that have accumulated on the bottom of the lake will travel for miles with a gentle breeze,” he said, referring to research by international experts. These sediments bring disease with them, and people who become poor in the absence of one of their vital resources will create new security problems. “But unfortunately in our country, nature becomes important with its death, and we want to resurrect the dead, which is useless.”
Drying of wetlands does not harm a single country, and the dust that rises from the dry floor of wetlands does not care about geographical boundaries.
“We have the Hur al-Azim wetland, which is shared with Iraq, or Hamun, which, if it dries up with Afghanistan and Lake Urmia, will have consequences for Turkey,” said Ismail Kahrom, an environmental activist.
“Who does not know what effect the drying up of any wetland will have on the entire life cycle on Earth,” Kahram said, referring to the Ramsar Convention, which was drafted in 1952. 5 million birds come to the wetlands every year and bring with them many properties that in the absence of wetlands we will not see their presence anymore. When migratory birds do not enter the wetlands or the wetlands lose their migratory properties, we will see that the population of mice, snakes and insects will increase. In fact, it should be said that the presence of these birds, apart from beauty, creates a kind of ecological balance. “The labyrinthine cycles of nature, whose order will be disrupted if even a small screw is removed.”
Bioactive Abdul Hussein Mirmiran also points to the human consequences of drying up wetlands. “People who earned their living through the wetland suffered an economic blow,” he said, referring to the drying up of the Hur al-Azim wetland and the loss of people’s livelihoods. “Wetlands provide livelihoods for many people through tourism and the micro-economy. In a place like Anzali Wetland, which has been drought for several years, think about how many jobs will be lost if it dries up completely.”
Mirmiran considers the most important factor in this situation to be mismanagement of water governance and misplaced interventions and manipulation of nature as the main reason for the dryness of the country’s wetlands. “We see that almost 95% of Gavkhooni wetland has dried up and only a small amount of moisture remains on the bottom,” he said. Unfortunately, the overloads upstream of the Zayandehrud watershed, the creation of water industries, or the misuse of people who built agricultural land and built villas with water have now led to the Gavkhoni wetland being destroyed. “The digging of illegal wells and the emptying of aquifers, along with the management of water zones, which for years made each province decide on its own for a national asset, have become other reasons for falling into deep and dry wells.”
He describes the scariest thing that happens after Gavkhooni is completely dry is the scattering of fine dust on the bottom of the lagoon, which is contaminated with industrial and heavy materials: “These dust particles can move up to 500 kilometers and cause strange diseases.”
If you have ever said to yourself that in our province there is no dry lagoon that wants to pollute our air, perhaps by knowing what deadly effects the movement of dust can have, you have realized the depth of the danger of drying up a large lagoon. »