what's up world? WRITTEN BY SHANE NATALIE THE
The Middle East is running out of water, and parts of it are becoming uninhabitable. Lake Urmia in Iran is rapidly starting to become a salt plain. Two decades ago, Urmia was the Middle East’s biggest lake, with a tourist center of many hotels and restaurants. "People would come here for swimming and would use the mud for therapeutic purposes. They would stay here at least for a few days," said Ahad Ahmed, a journalist in the former port town of Sharafkhaneh as he showed CNN photos of people enjoying the lake in 1995. Lake Urmia’s loss of water has been fast. It has more than halved in size - from 5400 square kilometers in the 1990s to just 2500 square kilometers now. There are now concerns that it will disappear entirely. Such problems are familiar in many parts of the Middle East - where water is simply running out. The region has experienced persistent drought and temperatures so high that they are barely suitable for human life. They have also suffered from the decrease of rainfall, which causes the water supply to decrease rapidly too. Some Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, Iraq, and Jordan, are pumping huge amounts of water from the ground for irrigation as they seek to improve their food selfsufficiency, Charles Iceland, the global director of water at the World Resources Institute (WRI), told CNN. TThe consequences of water becoming even scarcer are dire: areas could become uninhabitable; tensions over how to share and manage water resources like rivers and lakes could worsen; and more political violence could erupt. Climate change has really changed everything.
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