The Unveiling Floods

On August 28, 2024, CNBC, the largest global network for financial and business news, reported that tensions in the Red Sea have led to a 6% increase in carbon emissions, which are contributing to ozone depletion, during the first half of this year. The report emphasized that climate change is devastating agricultural crops, a claim cleverly engineered to rally environmental activists against the Houthi attacks on ships navigating between Israel and other nations through the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait. This narrative seeks to create a moral justification for U.S.-British military operations in Yemen, while attempting to disconnect the escalation in the Red Sea from the atrocities Israel has committed against the Palestinian people for a full year, with complete American backing.

This superficial claim, casually inserted into the broader Yemeni issue under the guise of the global "climate change" trend, is neither the most absurd nor the most reductive take on Yemen’s complex situation. The majority of commentators on the flooding disasters across various Yemeni regions have conveniently blamed climate change, riding the wave of this global trend without raising the pressing questions that should be asked. These recurring disasters, which threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Yemenis every summer for decades, are far more than a simple byproduct of global warming.

To avoid accusations of denying one of today's most sacred beliefs, this analysis does not dismiss climate change as one of the contributing factors to the exacerbation of flooding disasters in Yemen. However, it is crucial to recognize that it remains a secondary factor, overshadowed by a series of more immediate, yet often ignored, causes.
One such cause is Yemen’s geography, characterized by a network of highlands, mountains, and plateaus. These features funnel floodwaters towards the low-lying plains, valleys, and agricultural lands in other parts of Yemen, leading to the regular destruction of crops during the summer rainy seasons.

The second major cause lies in the lack of adequate infrastructure across most of Yemen. Essential systems to store seasonal rainwater, as well as effective barriers to slow and reduce the impact of floods, are practically non-existent. These include dams, reservoirs, irrigation systems, water tanks, and channels—structures that could have addressed one of Yemen’s most chronic problems: water scarcity. This issue has worsened the depletion of groundwater basins, pushing Yemen’s capital, Sana'a, towards becoming the first capital in the world to face complete water exhaustion, despite the vast amounts of wasted seasonal water that go unutilized, failing even to replenish the nation’s underground water reserves.

The problem is not limited to Yemen's lack of infrastructure for storing seasonal water; it extends to a long-standing approach of severely depleting the available water resources due to population growth. This is exacerbated by widespread mismanagement of water resources, chaotic drilling of artesian wells, and the primitive use of flood irrigation systems. Additionally, large amounts of water are wasted on irrigating qat crops. The absence of modern water distribution networks to homes and facilities remains one of the key factors behind the decline of agriculture in Yemen, not to mention the aging and deteriorating internal water transport networks within cities.

The third cause stems from the lack of effective institutional mechanisms to respond to natural disasters. Successive authorities have consistently evaded their responsibilities to protect people's lives and property in such events, citing the inevitability of these disasters and attributing them to uncontrollable natural factors. They have neglected their duty to develop infrastructure suited to the terrain or implement effective disaster response systems, whether the disasters are due to the country's geography or climate change. This includes rescue operations, transportation, relocation, reconstruction, service provision, and compensation for damages.

One must recall the conclusions made by prominent American journalist Thomas Friedman in his article on Yemen's water crisis, published in The New York Times on May 7, 2013, following his visit to the country. Friedman described the water crisis as the result of "half a century of political mismanagement, coupled with poor management of natural resources, oil-related distortions, and a population explosion."

Citing American environmentalist Dana Meadows, when asked whether it was too late to address climate change, Friedman noted her response, "The Arab world has exactly enough time — starting now. If people do not stop fighting with each other over dead ideologies and sectarian differences and focus instead on overcoming their deficits of knowledge, freedom and women’s empowerment — as the U.N. Arab Human Development Report urged — there is no hope."

Friedman also quoted Abdulrahman Al-Eryani, Yemen's former Minister of Water and Environment, who explained, "In the 1980s in Sana'a, you had to drill about 60 meters to find water; today, you need to go 850 to 1,000 meters. Only two of Yemen’s 15 underground water basins are still self-sufficient; the rest are being steadily depleted, and the worst disputes across Yemen are over groundwater scarcity." Al-Eryani added, "The Rada'a Basin, one of Al-Qaeda’s strongholds, is among the most threatened by depletion."

He also quoted him as saying, "In the north, on the border with Saudi Arabia, the Saada region used to be one of the richest areas for growing grapes, pomegranates and oranges. But they depleted their aquifer so badly that many farms went dry. This created the environment for the pro-Iranian Houthi sect to recruit young, unemployed farm laborers to start an armed rebellion."

Al-Eryani further explained that “the environmental disaster Yemen faces began in the 1970s when the oil boom and construction surge in the Arabian Gulf led two to three million unskilled Yemeni men to leave their villages to build Saudi Arabia.” He continued, “As a result, rural areas were left without labor, forcing women to chop down trees for fuel, leading to the erosion of terraced farming land due to lack of maintenance. This caused massive soil erosion on hillsides and extensive silt accumulation in valleys—natural watercourses—where fertile land had previously supported three annual crops, including Yemen's famous coffee. The silt accumulation destroyed the coffee trade and pushed Yemenis to cultivate other, less soil-intensive cash crops, most notably the water-thirsty qat tree, which has further drained the country’s groundwater reserves.”

Therefore, any aid offered by friendly nations or donors to Yemen in response to flood disasters must be contingent on the ruling authorities fulfilling their responsibilities. This aid must not reinforce the authorities' chronic neglect and dependency. The focus should be on investments in infrastructure, such as constructing an extensive network of dams, barriers, irrigation systems, reservoirs, and channels, alongside modern water management and transportation systems. This effort must also include governance and good management practices in the water, agriculture, and environmental sectors, as well as other related sectors, to ensure the desired, positive and long-lasting impacts that Yemen desperately needs.

The positive effects of such efforts would extend beyond strengthening Yemen’s water resources and replenishing groundwater reserves. They would boost agricultural production, expand its geographical and seasonal scope, create clean energy sources, promote domestic and international tourism, protect the environment, create job opportunities, improve the national economy, and reduce poverty, hunger, and internal conflicts—thus laying the groundwork for social stability and peace.