Ecosystem of the Middle East

Because the Middle East is mostly arid or semiarid in terms of annual rainfall, access to fresh water is a very important issue in the region. An additional feature of the Middle East that has bearing on the relationship between its environment and the world economy is that a significant portion of the world’s supplies of fossil fuels—56 percent of known reserves of petroleum and 40 percent of known reserves of natural gas—were located in the Middle East as of 2022.

The geographical region of the world known as the Middle East encompasses countries and climatic zones of several continents, including parts of western Asia and the north and northeast coasts of Africa. Its marine boundaries are shared by the Mediterranean, Black, Caspian, and Red seas, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean. The sovereign polities that make up the Middle East include but are not limited to Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Yemen, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Desertification has increased in a number of places in the Middle East as a result of the combination of climatic change and poor human management of resources, including (which may be done in ignorance, out of desperation, or even deliberately owing to political instability, as in the burning of pine forests in the Levant as acts of terrorism and war) and wind of soil caused by overgrazing of livestock. Based on satellite date collected between 1979 and 2005, some climate change in the region has been verified as natural, especially where possible expansion of the Tropics by 1 degree of latitude over twenty-five years—about 129 kilometers (80 miles)—resulted in increasing droughts and widespread fires and owing to jet stream movements toward both poles, making places such as the northern Middle East susceptible to even dryer conditions.

Although some of the region’s desertification can be attributed to natural causes, the majority has ben caused by human action. Although some of the region’s desertification can be attributed to natural causes, the majority has ben caused by human action. According to the World Bank, decreasing amounts of water and desertification will cost Middle Eastern nations between 6 and 14 percent of the Gross Domestic Product by the year 2025.

It is well known that the planting of pine forests in Israel from the 1960s onward not only resulted in several hundred million pine trees in large forested tracts, mostly Aleppo pine (Pinus halepensis) and Turkish pine (Pinus brutia), but also increased rainfall from orographic precipitation where normally rising windborne water vapor from Mediterranean evaporation was cooled by the forests. However, in the twenty-first century, the Israeli tree-planting effort has come under fire from those who see it as encroaching on Palestinian land.

Because of the region’s aridity, many states of the Middle East are dependent on imported water. Some, including Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt, Syria, and Israel, are dependent on external suppliers for more than 50 percent of their water, and many of the states in the Middle East import more than 25 percent of all the water they use.

Disputes over water rights in the Middle East are often acrimonious. Some watersheds, such as that of the Jordan River, are shared by multiple stakeholders whose diplomatic relationships have always been strained even without considerations of who owns the water rights or disputes over how to partition water supplies—whether by population, rainfall, commercial agricultural needs, or other political constraints.

Since 1990 war in the region has also had impacts on the of the Tigris-Euphrates basin. In Iraq alone in 1990, the Gulf War resulted in great damage to the water-supply system, and this was compounded in 2003 during the Iraq War, when the Shatt al Arab waterways near Basra in the south of Iraq were a major military target. Iraqi hydrology was subsequently destabilized by continued insurgencies and regional strife between Shia and Sunni factions and terrorism. From 1990 onward in Iraq eight major dams were destroyed or their watersheds polluted, and more than twenty-eight municipal water management facilities were destroyed. The hydrological infrastructure of Iraq was badly damaged between 2003 and 2018, leaving much of the without adequate water supplies for agriculture, drinking, and personal hygiene.

In Iran, before 1968 more than 50 percent of the nation’s water still derived from ancient qanat subterranean aqueducts or ancient surface canals; by 1987, however, considerable population growth in large cities such as Tehran made this ancient system woefully inadequate, and large dams had to be constructed. Only 10 percent of Iran—mostly its western Zagros montane region and the Caspian plain fed by the Elburz montane region—receives adequate rainfall for sustainable agriculture, and the central Dasht-e-Lūt desert receives almost no precipitation. New or revitalized dams are planned or under construction in Iran in the southern Zagros in Khūzestān, and these dams could have considerable environmental impact. Elsewhere, war between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah impaired water delivery in Lebanon; bombings and counterstrikes resulted in drastic damage to hydrology systems, including the destruction of more than forty water-supply distribution points, pipelines, and pumping stations.

The statement “He who controls water controls life” has been attributed toGudea of Lagash, a ruler in southern Mesopotamia (the area that now comprises Iraq and parts of Syria, Turkey, and Iran) around 2100 BCE. The control of water is increasingly vital for the arid Middle East, where various countries fight over marginal water sources and major diplomatic impasses characterize attempts by the United Nations to mediate the problems. Water rights are expected to become more problematic in the twenty-first century if projected global warming further reduces water supplies in the region.

Much of the energy used in the Middle East depends on the that is abundant in the region, but because this fossil-fuel resource is finite in supply and is also a significant source of pollution, great incentives exist for Middle Eastern nations to reduce this dependence. Because the Middle East has many cloudless days per year, the region has substantial potential for the development of solar power. In January, 2010, during the launching of a major national initiative for solar power development, Saudi Arabia’s petroleum and resources minister stated that the nation plans to export as much solar energy to the world in the future as it has exported oil in the past. As of 2024, the nation had completed or began work on thirteen large-scale renewable energy projects, with the goal of achieving 50 percent of its energy output from solar or wind sources by 2030. Among these projects was the construction of the world’s largest solar-energy power plant. Construction on the plant began in 2023, and it was expected to be completed by the end of 2025. When operational, the plant would produce 2,060 megawatts of solar power.

Because the Middle East is so dependent on imported water, removing salt from seawater has been an important priority in the region for decades. The task of increasing supplies of through desalination is complicated by two major environmental issues: the high of the water available for desalination and the large amounts of energy needed to operate desalination plants. Because they are surrounded by evaporitic basins where most of the water is lost to vapor before it can become precipitation, the bodies of water adjacent to Middle Eastern nations are among the highest salt-bearing waters in the world, with an average salinity of 41,000 ppm (parts per million) in the Red Sea and 38,000 ppm in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, meaning that salt content is about 4.1 percent and 3.8 percent, respectively. Fossil fuels are often used to generate the electricity needed to run desalination plants, but because the burning of these fuels contributes to pollution, attempts are ongoing to implement the use of wind or solar energy in such plants.

The Middle East produces 75 percent of global water desalination. In 2021 Saudi Arabia—the world’s largest producer of desalinated water—was operating thirty-two desalination plants supplying 63 percent of national drinking-water needs for a population of some 36 million. Israel is also a high-tech leader in desalination, producing a volume of 100 million cubic meters (3.5 billion cubic feet, or 26.4 billion gallons) per year of fresh water. The world’s largest desalination distillation operation is the Jebel Ali plant in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, which is expected eventually to provide up to 250 million cubic meters (8.8 billion cubic feet, or 66 billion gallons) of water per year from the Persian Gulf.

If the Middle East could implement massive water desalination on a scale that increases early twenty-first century output of fresh water by as much as 1,000 percent across many national boundaries, it is conceivable that agriculture and reforestation could thrive in the region, with a resultant rise in relative humidity and a sustainable hydrology cycle that would considerably change the dominant desert climate. It is important that the Middle East not deplete the fossil-fuel energy sources on which its overall economy depends before such a transformation can be effected.

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