Yemen by Ethan Machado: Collective Harvest 4

Yemen has been under intense conflict, and civil unrest for many years. The direct effects of this destabilization is the disruption to thousands of lives. But the question remains, how has such conflict affected the surrounding environment and the global climate as a whole? This question ties in directly with what we have learned in the past unit, and the Yemen environmental aspect is in dire need of attention.

According to a report published by the Centre For Governance and Peace-building-Yemen, in Collaboration with Centre for International Development Issues Nigmegen, The Netherlands, the global and local climate change impacts of the conflict are quickly arising. The country has a high level of food import dependency, food insecurity and poverty. . Yemen imports between 70 and 90 percent of cereals and is a net importer of many other food items. Yemen is also the poorest country in the Arab world, with an estimated 65 percent of its people living in poverty, and is among the most food-insecure countries in the world, with 32 percent of the population hungry, that is, without access to enough food. Rural–urban inequalities are high. The number of food-insecure people living in rural areas (37.3 percent), is more than five times higher than in urban areas (17.7 percent). Within rural areas, rural non-farm households have higher food-insecurity rates than farm households. The ongoing war is hitting the Yemeni economy, society the poor hard. There are sharp declines in oil exports, foreign aid, and tourism plus double digit inflation. Since the beginning of 2011, there is a huge increased number of poor and food insecure people, as today 70% of the total Yemeni population relies on aid to survive. Nearly 400,000 children in Yemen are at risk of death from severe acute malnutrition.

Also according to the report, Yemen's agriculture sector mainly depends on primitive methods and rain steams which make it vulnerable to extreme climate changes such as drought and floods. The sector also faces various challenges, the most important of all is the scarcity of water resources. It absorbs almost 50 percent of the work force and accounts for 11.4 percent of GDP (current prices) in the average during the period 2001-08. Rainfall varies widely across the country, from less than 50 mm along the coast, and rising with the topography to between 500 and 800 mm in the Western Highlands, and dropping again to below 50 mm in the desert interior. The water sector in Yemen faces formidable challenges, and water table is declining in average by about 6-7 meters annually due to groundwater over-abstraction. The capital Sana’a is one of top ten water scarce cities in the world and its groundwater is being drastically depleted. The increasingly growing water crisis in Yemen has severe socioeconomic and environmental consequences including decreased agriculture productivity, reduced food security, increased conflict over resources and accelerated land degradation, and increased livelihood vulnerability. With the current weak adaptive and institutional capacity, climate change associated impact including more frequent, and prolonged droughts under specific climatic scenarios will push livelihood vulnerability of the poor into further declines, leading to further environmental resource degradation, increased ecological scarcities, and hardship, and hence increased poverty expansion.