The beginnings of land reform in Egypt, 1956. JP /Press Association. All rights reserved.As the UNHC reports this week that over 10,000 migrants have been killed crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Europe since 2014, it is clear that we are only at the start of the problem for Europe. While war, the spread of Islamism and the collapse of states such as Libya are rightly blamed as the key factors behind the mass movement of people from North Africa and the Mediterranean, aid agencies now accept that some of these young men are on the road because of the discreet and mostly unreported results of climate change.
Walking down a food line on the Greek island of Lesbos during the winter, I was astounded to find young men from Sub-Saharan Africa and as far in the east as Bangladesh. Among them were two agricultural workers from Iran, which struck me as odd because I hadn’t associated their country with the sort of crises that explained the presence of the others in the line.
But once you know about Iran’s climate, it isn’t so surprising. There have been only three years in the last 25 when the country did not record a decline in rainfall. The shortfall has usually been met by using groundwater, but this is drying up. Iran has used 70 percent of its supplies of groundwater in the last 50 years, which means it will have very little to fall back on over the next 20 years.
