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.

Japanese man invents an ‘edible’ plastic bag alternative to save Nara’s sacred deer. A local entrepreneur in the Japanese tourist destination of Nara has developed an alternative for plastic bags to save the lives of the town’s sacred deer.

Hidetoshi Matsukawa, who works for Nara-ism, a souvenir wholesale agent, told CNN he heard last year that the deer, which roam the city’s park, were dying because of eating plastic bags.

"I wanted to do something to protect the deer, which is the symbol of Nara, " he said. The city is home to around 1000 sacred deer, which are officially named as a national nature treasure in Japan, and tourists usually feed them treats.

Sadly, in July 2019, a local welfare group said nine deer had been found dead, with plastic bags in their stomachs due to visitors throwing plastic bags in the park. This led to warnings being given to visitors to not throw any plastic bags there. Matsukawa wanted to come up with a different solution to the problem and teamed up with a local paper manufacturer and a design firm to work on the project. Between them, they developed “Shikagami” or deer paper, which is made from rice bran and milk cartons.

"We learned that rice bran is mostly wasted in the process of rice polishing, " said Matsukawa. "So this paper helps to reduce that waste as well” . Matsukawa tested the bags and made sure that they were safe for human and animal consumption. The bags have since been tested at local banks and the Todaiji temple, Nara's main tourist attraction. The temple and banks bought 4,000-5,000 of the bags for 100 yen (around 95 cents) each as part of the pilot project.

The price will fall if more businesses sign up to use the bags, said Matsukawa. He wants to replace plastic bags with “Shikagami” to prevent more deer from dying after eating them.