
Behind barbed-wire fences at this camp in northern Jordan, about 33,000 Syrians—half of them children—exist uneasily, housed in rows of rudimentary shelters that barely protect them from the winter cold.
Drinking water must be brought in daily by dozens of tanker trucks or pumped from desert boreholes that overexploit Jordan's largest groundwater basin.
As in Jordan, the world's refugee crisis, which is intimately linked with water availability both in the homelands that people escape and in the camps where they find shelter, is large and growing. Some 66 million people—a France-sized population—are displaced.
An estimated 28,300 refugees a day across the globe flee conflict and persecution, the relief agency UNHCR said. Fifty-five percent come from just three countries: Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Syria, which the World Bank says has endured the largest refugee crisis since World War II with more than half the country's pre-war population having left their homes since 2011.
Now, with many Syrians in their seventh winter of displacement, hosting and supporting 650,000 registered refugees costs the Jordanian government almost $900 million a year, according to Oxfam. To help, non-governmental organizations supply water and relief groups visit to offer aid. Celebrities and royalty tour the camps on occasion.
Zaatari is the biggest refugee camp in Jordan, opening in 2012 close to Syria's border and now housing 79,000 Syrian refugees. Azraq, 50 miles southeast, was built on unused desert land after Zaatari swelled beyond capacity just a year after opening, to more than 156,000 people. With high summer temperatures, cool winters and blowing desert sand, conditions at both camps challenge the mind and body.
Zaatari's corrugated shelters take a beating in the sun and heat while its water supply and wastewater disposal are constant concerns. The UN said at least 82 water trucks a day fill the camp's water tanks so that 950,000 liters of water a day can flow to some 76 taps. Boreholes also provide 3.2 million liters of drinking water a day, giving camp residents access to about 20 liters a day, or 5 gallons per person. This allotment is used for bathing, cooking, cleaning and drinking.
Built as a temporary camp, Zaatari now functions like a city with 12 districts, hundreds of shops, a police station, mosque, schools, and health clinics. Water and wastewater networks were constructed by the humanitarian group ACTED.
A treatment plant purifies about 80 percent of the wastewater generated in the camp. A UNICEF grant led to the upgrading of 1,300 private toilets by ACTED. Hand-washing sinks and toilets for the disabled were also built to address complaints of unsanitary living conditions.
Both camps were visited in November by the non-profit Atlantic Humanitarian Relief group led by its Syrian-American founder, Humam Akbik, a Harvard-trained pain-management specialist from Damascus now based in Cincinnati. The international group of physicians, nurses, dentists and pharmacists worked almost without stop from morning to sundown. They came at their own cost, brought their own instruments and supplies to refugee camps and clinics that sometimes lacked sinks with running water or a clean toilet. They provided free exams, minor operations, dental services, medicine, and even psychiatric help to traumatized orphans.
Two sisters wait for care at the health clinic in Al Azraq. Randall Hackley
"Water was a big problem," said Rowena Milligan, a physician who took part in the humanitarian mission and traveled from the UK. "You couldn't wash your hands before/after examining patients so could only use alcohol gel, which isn't ideal."
At refugee camps, clinics and random camps in northern Jordan from Ajloun to the outskirts of Amman and Azraq, volunteers played with the children, painting their faces and engaging in games. Play activities "help take their mind off things," Akbik said. "Helps these kids feel like kids again."
Worrisome Trends for Climate and Migration
Security experts have warned for years that a drying climate in the Middle East, Sahel, and other mid-latitude regions will set up conditions of environmental stress for the countries least capable of managing the strain. At least 25 percent of the planet, including Jordan, will experience serious drought and desertification within three decades if attempts by the Paris agreement to curb global warming aren't met, according to the journal Nature Climate Change.
Those who choose to leave face peril on the journey. The International Organization for Migration says more than 3,100 migrants lost their lives last year drowning in the Mediterranean Sea, and 390 more from Jan. 1 to Feb. 4, 2018, compared with 257 for the same period in 2017, as they attempted the dangerous crossing from North Africa to southern Europe. It's the fourth year in a row that the death toll surpassed 3,000.
And in Asia, Rohingya Muslims have drowned trying to escape state-sponsored violence in their homeland of Myanmar. At least 670,000 men, women and children have fled to Bangladesh by boat and foot since August in what the UN calls "the world's fastest-growing humanitarian crisis."
The Rohingya crisis even prompted a UN video that ended with a plea to better address the refugees' urgent needs of clean water.
The pleas are founded on evidence of infection. At the informal Rohingya camps in southeast Bangladesh, water pumps next to open sewers have stoked fear of disease outbreaks, and led to vaccination, clean water and sanitation drives. At the Kutupalong refugee camp extension, 20 tube wells were added. So were almost 120 latrine chambers.
The World Health Organization reports that diptheria is "rapidly spreading among Rohingya refugees in Cox's Bazar," a city in Bangladesh. Six deaths were reported in December. Diptheria is a highly infectious respiratory disease that often appears in overcrowded areas with no proper sanitation system. Haiti endured similar cholera outbreaks in recent years related to contaminated water issues.
Sometimes small improvements in water technology can mean big lifestyle improvements for refugees.
In southwestern Algeria, Sahrawi refugees exiled by Morocco more than three decades ago are using what little water they have in newly efficient ways: growing soil-less hydroponics in solar-powered container units. At five remote camps near Tindouf, trays of barley are now grown for Sahrawi livestock in the Sahara desert through a World Food Programme project.
The Sahrawis have come a long way since eight years ago, when water was trucked in via UNHCR tankers and outhouses were crude holes beside mud-brick homes.
For those in Al Azraq, the hope is that they do not have to put down roots, that they can go home again.
Climate Crisis to Uproot Millions in the Coming Decades: Nations Need to Be Ready https://t.co/BIzjRfdD8V… https://t.co/WKqQ1g9XW9— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch)1513911631.0
Reporting contributed by Randall Hackley, a former AP and Bloomberg correspondent who has reported from 18 countries and visited refugee camps in Jordan, Algeria, Haiti, Peru, and the U.S.
Reposted with permission from our media associate Circle of Blue.
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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