In Adham Saleh’s childhood memory, the wetlands on the edge of this coastal city look like a postcard.
When he was a boy, he came here each winter to watch dusty-pink pelicans nosedive into the water and cotton-candy-colored flamingos strut through the shallows.
“The birds used to flock here around this time of year,” he says. “We never knew their names or the details of their journey. All we knew was the beauty they brought to Aden.”
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Yemen’s decadelong civil war has been catastrophic for both its people and its environment. Now, activists are attempting to save the country’s rich coastal wetlands before it is too late.
Today he is an intercity bus driver. And now, as he nudges his vehicle around the final turn into Pelican Lake Reserve, his memories dissolve. In front of him are shriveled plastic bags, long-abandoned bottles, and discarded construction rubble. The water is covered with algae.
“It has become more like a dumping ground,” he laments. “There are no birds left.”
The culprit is the devastating civil war that has raged in Yemen for the last decade. The conflict has forced millions of people from their homes and collapsed the country’s economy, plunging more than 80% of the population into dire poverty.
And this human-made crisis has also left deep scars on the natural world. Once a stopover for thousands of birds migrating between Europe and Asia or Africa, the wetlands around Aden have become a shadow of their former selves. Now, environmental experts warn that without urgent action, the ecosystem could vanish entirely.
“Allowing this sanctuary to deteriorate means Aden loses a piece of its natural heritage and a vital economic resource,” says Jamil Al-Qudsi, director of Aden’s Protected Areas and Natural Resources within the Yemeni Ministry of Water and Environment. “Without immediate intervention, what remains of this fragile ecosystem risks becoming nothing more than a memory.”
The rise and fall
Nestled between Europe and Asia, the port city of Aden has served as an important trade city for millennia, serving empires ranging from the ancient Greeks to the Portuguese and the Ottomans. It has played a similar role for the world’s birds.
For centuries, thousands of birds have stopped for a layover here each year as they migrate from Europe to Africa and Asia. The wetlands’ plentiful supply of fish and the shelter they provide from the arid desert all around have made them hospitable to dozens of species, from pelicans and flamingos to eagles, herons, and gulls.
Locals have also relied heavily on these strips of shoreline. Salt harvesters sourced their product in Aden’s wetlands. And as a “vital breeding ground” for a variety of marine species, they have long been essential to the city’s fishing industry, Mr. Al-Qudsi says.
In 2006, Yemen’s government declared a 110-hectare (270-acre) wetland in northern Aden to be a critical breeding ground for both local and migratory birds. That was meant to protect them from human encroachment and pollution.
Bassem Akram Habtoor/Egab
By the late 2000s, however, Aden’s wetlands, including Pelican Lake, were in crisis. As the city grew, they were being carved up and sucked dry for farms and construction.
In late 2014, the situation worsened dramatically. Protests against a suspension of fuel subsidies empowered a long-standing Iranian-backed rebel movement called the Houthis, who seized control of Yemen’s capital, Sana’a. The conflict soon spiraled into an all-out civil war, plunging Yemen, already the poorest nation in the region, into chaos and violence.
Although Aden was spared the worst of the fighting, the city’s population exploded, as Yemenis fleeing from elsewhere in the country took shelter there.
With high demand for housing, new buildings began to spring up everywhere, including on the shores of wetlands like Pelican Lake Reserve. Construction companies flouted poorly enforced zoning laws. Meanwhile, as the war ground on, the government began to lose its grip on public services. Wastewater went untreated, rubbish uncollected, and sewage unprocessed.
People living near Pelican Lake Reserve and environmental activists began to notice that as trash and construction rubble piled up and sewage gurgled into the water, fewer and fewer birds were touching down there each winter.
“The war has ravaged the wetland reserves,” says Jamal Bawazir, a retired professor of environmental sciences at the University of Aden.
A tarnished jewel
For the communities living on the edges of the reserve, the loss was more than economic. Generations of Aden residents have grown up watching the spectacle of the sky above the city filling with birds each winter.
For that reason, even as the war ground on and necessity forced people – and their garbage – deeper into the reserve, some things remained sacred.
“Although some have resorted to landfilling in the reserve, no one has turned to hunting seabirds or collecting their eggs and chicks,” says Ibrahim Muneim, an environmental activist and former city official who worked on environmental management in Aden. “This is a long-standing tradition of the people here. Any act of hunting these birds for sport or destruction is met with strong condemnation.”
Occasionally over the last decade, residents have organized community cleanups or small awareness campaigns to stop people from further polluting the reserve. But these efforts will continue to be a drop in the bucket, experts say, unless Aden’s government and local environmental groups take more initiative – and bring more money.
Now, experts and activists say their best hope is for the war to end soon so that life – human and bird – can return to Pelican Lake.
“This lake could have remained a jewel adorning the city of Aden, a cherished part of our collective memory for us and for future generations,” says Mr. Saleh, the bus driver. He hopes it will be revived, he adds, so that “One day, my children, too, will be able to enjoy it as much as I did.”
This article is published in collaboration with Egab.
