In a recent study, Monash University finds that 99.99% of the world’s population is exposed to daily ambient levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exceeding World Health Organisation recommendations. On the occasion of this year’s International Day of Clean Air for Blue Skies, held annually on 7 September, it is therefore unsurprising that the UN has called for ‘stronger partnerships, increased investment, and shared responsibility for overcoming air pollution.’
But nowhere are such partnerships needed more than in Iraq. Already the fifth most vulnerable country to climate change, environmental technology firm IQAir has graded Iraqi air as the second most polluted on Earth after that of Chad.
Behind poor air quality in Iraq is a deadly cocktail of contributing factors. Explosive exposés from the BBC and others have revealed the undeclared gas flaring practices of oil supermajors such as BP in an economy built on hydrocarbons, with the Iraqi government acknowledging their carcinogenic effects on local populations. Climate change is multiplying and intensifying toxic dust storms and attendant respiratory illnesses. With their energy infrastructures battered by decades of conflict, citizens are turning to diesel-burning generators for power, filling urban skylines with thick, black smoke. The burn pits of American occupation continue to have a lethal legacy.
Still, twenty years on from the U.S.-led invasion, Daesh has been territorially defeated and ‘today Iraq is enjoying its most stable period since 2003.’ The newfound stability has allowed Iraq to begin tending to its environmental scars and is encouraging enhanced focus and action on the climate emergency. In 2020, the government launched a National Adaptation Plan for climate resilience. In 2021, Iraq ratified the Paris Agreement and submitted its first Nationally Determined Contribution. This momentum has brought a host of climate-conscious initiatives in its train, including the Mesopotamia Revitalisation Plan and the Solid Waste Management Act, a law being drafted to incentivise recycling and energy conversion from waste.
Federal fractures: Iraq’s Disputed Internal Boundaries (DIBs)
Despite improvements, the road to stable government in Iraq is far from straightforward. One source of continued tension and dissension in internal politics has been the fraught relationship between Iraq’s central Government of Iraq (GoI), ruling from Baghdad, and the autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), led by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in the northern city of Erbil.
The history of Iraqi-Kurdish conflict is long and turbulent. No sooner had Iraq’s borders been drawn by the British in 1920 than Kurdish secession movements proliferated, most famously in the Mahmud Barzanji revolts. Following the First and Second Iraqi-Kurdish Wars, attempts at Kurdish autonomy were met with increasingly extreme responses from Ba’athist Iraq, including the forced deportations under the policy of Arabisation or the bloodshed of the Anfal campaign.
After acquiring de facto autonomy in the aftermath of the Gulf War, the KRI received legal recognition as an autonomous region under the Iraqi Constitution of 2005. Yet while its borders officially comprise the Dohuk, Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, and Halabja governorates, the KRG claims a far greater portion of territory, often citing Article 140’s commitment to righting the wrongs of Saddam Hussein’s Arabisation policies and to democratically resolving the region’s political ambiguities. Large tracts of northern Iraq are consequently disputed, with neither the GoI nor the KRG having outright control.
This patchwork of contested land poses an enduring challenge to the Iraqi state, and indeed to meaningful climate action. Although relations between the two parties have improved since the Islamic State’s downfall, continued disharmony and neglectful public authorities have militated against efforts to enhance local security and development. There are now warning signs of a potential remobilisation of Daesh in the disputed territories due to the current power vacuum.
It was under Daesh occupation that the northern governorates saw their air progressively poisoned. In what has become known as the Daesh Winter, the group’s militants torched oil wells, ravaged industrial sites, and dumped toxic material across the Kirkuk and Nineveh governorates. The scorched-earth policy cast a ‘dim pall over Qarrayah’, a town blanketed for months by lethal fumes as retreating Daesh forces set 19 oil wells alight in July 2016. In October 2016, 161,000 tonnes of sulfur dioxide were released in only a week after a Daesh arson attack on the Al-Mishraq factory, comparable to a small volcanic eruption.
Years later, progress on air quality in the affected regions has seemed sluggish. Surveys reveal air pollution as the most important and pressing environmental issue for citizens in Kirkuk and Salahaddin, but the authorities of disputed territories lack the stable governance and strategic planning capabilities necessary to tackle the problem. Reports from KirkukNow that 2023 state budget allocations to Article 140 implementation are being halved may worsen fears of administrative abandonment.
The case of Kirkuk
A melange of Kurds, Arabs, Turkmens, and Assyrians, Kirkuk’s demographic diversity has earned it the sobriquet of “mini-Iraq”, a microcosm of the nation’s citizenry.
The city likewise epitomises the prevalence of air pollution in public consciousness. Launched this year, the Environmental Platform is an open-data Iraqi app through which citizens can pinpoint and upload evidence of pollution to raise awareness, lobby for government responses, and encourage social solidarity. Be it Laylan Cement Factory’s chemical effluvia worsening asthma symptoms, windborne toxic dust and rubble threatening Zarqa Al-Yamamah Primary School, slaughterhouse waste burning beside the Khasso river, or Kirkuk General Hospital incinerator emissions choking residents in the vicinity, every submission made from Kirkuk relates to air pollution concerns.
Yet Kirkuk also exemplifies the political minefield that climate policy must traverse in the disputed territories. Sitting atop Baba Gurgur–Iraq’s third biggest oil reserve, pumping out 35 million barrels of crude oil in 2021–the question of Kirkuk’s future strikes at the heart of Iraqi-Kurdish disputes.
Kirkuk is explicitly named in Article 140 of the Iraqi Constitution, according to which the city’s status should have been determined via referendum by 31 December 2007. The failure to hold said referendum has fuelled distrust and acrimony ever since. In 2014, the KRG’s military forces, known as the Peshmerga, seized upon the disarray of Daesh’s Northern Iraq offensive to take control of Kirkuk. In September 2017, Kirkuk participated in the controversial Kurdistan Region independence referendum. One month later, the Battle of Kirkuk returned the city to GoI control in what ‘could have created a new civil war.’
Stymying any speedy settlement, the U.S. Institute of Peace explains, are two competing mythologies:
Iraqi actors themselves often mythologize the contested land, with Kurdish leaders describing Kirkuk (…) as the heart of the Kurdish nation and ‘our Jerusalem.’ Similarly, Arab politicians hold the country’s current provincial boundaries to be sacrosanct and argue that any alteration to them will lead inexorably to the disintegration of Iraq (…) Framing the territorial conflict in existential terms (…) makes compromise more difficult and reduces the chances of resolving the dispute politically.
Those interested in the repercussions on Kirkuk’s governance need look no further than this week’s news cycle. In the wake of a government decision to return the army’s Kirkuk Joint Operations Command headquarters to the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the building’s former owner, the city is now paralyzed by rival riots. Protestors have symbolically blocked the Erbil-Kirkuk highway, four civilians have been killed, and Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani has imposed a local curfew in the hope of restoring calm.
Air pollution: a window for cooperation
In this internecine context, it may seem naive to expect Erbil-Baghdad cooperation on the matter of air pollution. And yet, this would not be the first time that the GoI and the KRG have set differences aside in the name of a greater climate good.
The issue of water is a case in point. As Iraq reckons with a growing water scarcity crisis, the KRG has embittered Baghdad by using its upstream geography and water supply control as bargaining chips in federal budgetary negotiations, while Arab farmers have accused Kurdish authorities of deliberately depriving their farms of water in an effort to displace them. Recently, however, significant rapprochement between Erbil and Baghdad has produced a series of promising agreements on water, including the formation of a joint water management committee. Collaborations like these set a hopeful precedent for air-related partnerships.
There is political will in both Erbil and Baghdad to fight air pollution. Both authorities have a responsibility to ensure that ideological discord does not deprive the disputed territories of clean air. If anything, working together on common solutions to common climate problems can present rare opportunities to rebuild trust and bridge regional divides, as success stories in water cooperation show.
Air pollution is a transboundary challenge. It cares little for geographical or political frontiers and can spread its pall far beyond any initial point of origin. No one neighbourhood, city, or region alone will clean Iraq’s air. And it is only with concerted collaboration between the central government and the Kurdistan Region that the communities of northern Iraq will–at last–begin to breathe easy.
Samuel Myers is a former student of Balliol College, Oxford. He now works as a policy advisor on sustainable development for the UK Government.