"Fifteen years after the former Iraqi government used old blueprints dating from the British Empire to drain a vast wetland, the area is slowly creeping back to life.
For millennia, the Mesopotamian Marshlands were an isolated and swampy oasis in the desert, covering more than 20,000 square km of interconnected lakes, mudflats and bayous. Some believe it is where the biblical Eden was located.
The U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), which first alerted the world via satellite images that the marshes were vanishing, is playing an active role in capacity-building and promoting sustainable development in the area.
The agency created the Marshland Information Network, comprising the Marshland Arabs Forum, various government ministries and the U.S.-based Iraq Foundation, which runs the Eden Again Project.
"We're targeting smaller communities with projects for drinking water, sanitation and water quality management," said Chizuru Aoki of UNEP. "The goal is to support environmentally sustainable technologies." Read more...
For background on this story read The Demise of Mesopotamian Marshlands, UN Chronicle 2002
Insight (PDF file) from the President of the United Nations Foundation on the role of the UNF: "We focus substantively on children's health, with the World Health Organization and UNICEF. Some major partners of ours in that area include Rotary on polio and the Red Cross and the Center for Disease Control on measles; and we are also working on an emerging malaria issue. We work on AIDS and reproductive health issues with UNAIDS and UNFPA, focused in particular on the ability of people to protect themselves and on women's empowerment. We work on a range of environmental issues with UNDP and UNEP, and with a special focus on energy, security, and climate issues through our own Energy Future Coalition. You all may have seen a recent initiative of Frank Gaffney, Jim Woolsey, Boyden Gray and others focused on security and energy. That is an initiative that came out of these efforts. And we have a variety of initiatives on human rights and governance."