Climate change Culture clashes heat up in Iraq’s cities

The United Nations says Iraq is one of the five countries in the world worst affected by climate change. Around 92% of Iraqi land is threatened by desertification and temperatures here are increasing seven times faster than the global average. This makes agriculture difficult, if not impossible, and causes farming families to migrate to Iraq’s cities in search of work and opportunity.

“Rural towns in Iraq already face a number of issues,” says James Munn, country director of the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Iraq office. Due to long periods of conflict in Iraq, rural areas are already resource starved, he said . “So there are fewer jobs, not much working infrastructure, scarcity of water, few schools, few hospitals. That’s the backdrop to what’s happening now. And then climate change is supercharging all those vulnerabilities further, forcing even more people to leave.” A spokesperson from the UN’s International Organization for Migration, or IOM, in Iraq, said between June 2018 and June 2023, it had identified at least 83,000 people displaced “due to climate change and environmental degradation across central and southern Iraq.”

“These movements are largely rural to urban, and over short distances,” IOM said. And, the spokesperson confirmed, “host communities in urban areas have cited tensions.”

Many of the climate-displaced end up living in shanty towns or informal settlements in and around larger cities. “New arrivals tend to fall at the margins of a system that local populations are already accustomed to,” the IOM spokesperson said. “Then a majority of the displaced population is also employed in low wage jobs in the informal sector — things like daily labor, informal commerce, small businesses or in workshops — while local residents mostly have government jobs.”

The newcomers compete with long-term residents for already-stretched infrastructure and may find it difficult to access things like transport, healthcare or education. Even sewage systems and clean drinking water can be hard to come by. Social support networks may be limited and there’s more chance of mental illness and substance abuse.

Recent reports from out of the country, both by monitoring organizations and media, suggest that rural-urban antipathy is growing. City residents suspect the newcomers of crime, violence and primitive politics and say they’re bringing tribal conflicts into the city with them. Local politicians have tended to scapegoat people from rural areas too.

This is not just true for Iraq: Sociologists have long remarked on the political differences between city dwellers, who may be more liberal and tolerant of cultural diversity, and rural populations, who are seen as “country bumpkins” and more conservative or religious.

This is also why what begins as a neighborhood scrap about garden walls or women’s clothing can eventually evolve to have national ramifications. Baghdad’s sprawling suburb, Sadr City, is a good example of this. It was built in the 1950s to accommodate rural Iraqis who fled drought, poverty and dispossession.

Over time, the “rural migrants and their descendants transformed peripheral settlements into core sites of resistance, providing popular bases of support to communists, nationalists and, later, Shiite Islamists,” Huma Gupta, a professor of architecture wrote in a 2021 briefing for the US-based Crown Center for Middle East Studies. Rural migration into Baghdad “fundamentally transformed the political trajectory of Iraq,” Gupta argued.