Yemen’s decade long civil war has been catastrophic for both its people and its environment. Now, activists are attempting to save the country’s rich coastal wetlands before it is too late, according to an article published by The Christian Science Monitor.
In Adham Saleh’s childhood memory, the wetlands on the edge of this coastal city look like a postcard. When he was a boy, he used to visit each winter to watch dusty-pink pelicans nosedive into the water and cotton-candy-colored flamingos strut through the shallows.
“The birds used to flock here around this time of year,” he says. “We never knew their names or the details of their journey. All we knew was the beauty they brought to Aden.”
Today he is an intercity bus driver. And now, as he nudges his vehicle around the final turn into Pelican Lake Reserve, his memories dissolve.
In front of him are shriveled plastic bags, long-abandoned bottles, and discarded construction rubble. The water is covered with algae. “It has become more like a dumping ground,” he laments. “There are no birds left.”
The culprit is the devastating war that has raged in Yemen for the last decade. The conflict has forced millions of people from their homes and collapsed the country’s economy, plunging more than 80% of the population into dire poverty.
And this human-made crisis has also left deep scars on the natural world. Once a stopover for thousands of birds migrating between Europe and Asia or Africa, the wetlands around Aden have become a shadow of their former selves. Now, environmental experts warn that without urgent action, the ecosystem could vanish entirely.
“Allowing this sanctuary to deteriorate means Aden loses a piece of its natural heritage and a vital economic resource,” says Jamil Al-Qudsi, director of Aden’s Protected Areas and Natural Resources within the Yemeni Ministry of Water and Environment. “Without immediate intervention, what remains of this fragile ecosystem risks becoming nothing more than a memory.”
Nestled between Europe and Asia, the port city of Aden has served as an important trade city for millennia, serving empires ranging from the ancient Greeks to the Portuguese and the Ottomans. It has played a similar role for the world’s birds.
For centuries, thousands of birds have stopped for a layover here each year as they migrate from Europe to Africa and Asia. The wetlands’ plentiful supply of fish and the shelter they provide from the arid desert all around have made them hospitable to dozens of species, from pelicans and flamingos to eagles, herons, and gulls.
Locals have also relied heavily on these strips of shoreline. Salt harvesters sourced their product in Aden’s wetlands. And as a “vital breeding ground” for a variety of marine species, they have long been essential to the city’s fishing industry, Mr. Al-Qudsi says.
By the late 2000s, however, Aden’s wetlands, including Pelican Lake, were in crisis. As the city grew, they were being carved up and sucked dry for farms and construction.
In 2006, Yemen’s government declared a 110-hectare (270-acre) wetland in northern Aden to be a critical breeding ground for both local and migratory birds. That was meant to protect them from human encroachment and pollution.
In late 2014, the situation worsened dramatically. Protests against a suspension of fuel subsidies empowered a long-standing Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who seized control of Yemen’s capital, Sana’a. The conflict soon spiraled into an all-out civil war, plunging Yemen, already the poorest nation in the region, into chaos and violence.
Although Aden was spared the worst of the fighting, the city’s population exploded, as Yemenis fleeing from elsewhere in the country took shelter there.
With high demand for housing, new buildings began to spring up everywhere, including on the shores of wetlands like Pelican Lake Reserve. Construction companies flouted poorly enforced zoning laws. Meanwhile, as the war ground on, the government began to lose its grip on public services. Wastewater went untreated, rubbish uncollected, and sewage unprocessed.
People living near Pelican Lake Reserve and environmental activists began to notice that as trash and construction rubble piled up and sewage gurgled into the water, fewer and fewer birds were touching down there each winter.