Experts: Darfur Faces Environment Crisis

[jpak]

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/w-af/2007/jun/22/062204923.html

Decades of drought helped trigger Darfur's violence as rival groups fought over scarce water and arable land. Now, experts fear the war and its refugee crisis are making the environment even worse, leaving the land increasingly uninhabitable and intensifying tensions with no end to the drought in sight.

Darfur's tragedy could be repeated in much of North Africa and the Middle East, experts fear, because growing populations are straining a very limited water supply. Data show rainfall steadily declining in the region, possibly because of weather changes linked to global warming.

"The consciousness of the world on the issue of climate change has to change fast," said Muawia Shaddad of the Sudan Environment Conservation Society. "Darfur is just an early warning."

Darfur's ethnic African farmers and tribes of mostly Arab nomads had long been competing for the region's meager water and land resources, experts say. But the severe droughts of the 1980s and meager rainfall since then sharpened the conflict between the two populations.

<more>

[YankeyMCC]

1. Could be repeated the world over given the state of water supplies

and how they are generally mismanaged in terms of providing clean safe water for the most people.