A team of UN scientists waiting to assess the environmental fallout from the war in Iraq is being held up because the US has not yet allowed them into the country.
The team hopes to gauge the threat to Iraqis from unclean drinking water, uncollected toxic waste, bombed chemical and weapons factories, unexploded munitions and sewage-filled rivers. Mapping these pollution hot spots must be a top priority before the country can be rebuilt, the UN Environment Programme鈥檚 director Klaus Toepfer told New 杏吧原创 at the weekend. 鈥淚t is very important that we get access to conditions on the ground quickly,鈥� he said. 鈥淭he problems are alarming and a clean-up plan is needed urgently.鈥�
But despite the urgency, no date has been set for the assignment, and the scientists, to be led by former Finnish environment minister Pekka Haavisto, are unable to enter Iraq. Toepfer blamed the delay on the inability of UNEP to establish with the occupying forces a legal structure for the UN humanitarian effort. 鈥淲e are doing whatever is possible to contact the coalition,鈥� he says. Privately, UNEP officials say the US is being 鈥渦ncooperative and unhelpful鈥�.
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UNEP has enhanced its reputation in recent years with fast assessments of the environmental impacts of conflicts in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, where both sides cooperated in its field study. It has already carried out a preliminary desk study of Iraq鈥檚 environmental problems, published last week, which suggests that the post-war threats arise mostly from the military activity of the invading forces. Pre-war fears that Saddam Hussein would sabotage hundreds of oil wells or unleash chemical or biological weapons proved unfounded.
The US Air Force says it dropped more than 27,000 bombs and other ordnance on Iraq, including more than 800 cruise missiles, almost three times as many as during the 1991 war. In addition, says UNEP, military vehicles 鈥渨ill have caused widespread degradation of fragile desert ecosystems that may take decades to recover, increasing erosion, loss of topsoil and vulnerability to sandstorms.鈥�
The urgency of addressing environmental hazards was reinforced at the weekend when UNICEF, the UN Children鈥檚 Fund, reported an epidemic of diarrhoea in Baghdad. One hospital admitted 300 cases in just three hours. UNICEF also warned that water treatment plants would soon run out of chemicals. If that happens, it says, 鈥渁 dramatic escalation in the incidence of diarrhoeal disease may be unavoidable.鈥�
Meanwhile, the UN鈥檚 Food and Agriculture Organization warns that large parts of the vital spring grain and vegetable harvests in the south of Iraq could have been damaged by power failures that disrupted the pumping of water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers into irrigation channels during the growing season.