Environment and Habitat

At least 20 people are confirmed to have been killed by a landslide in Shovi, northern Georgia, on Thursday last week (3 August). The Speaker of the Georgian Parliament, Shalva Papuashvili, gave the latest update on Wednesday morning (9 August). According to the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs, around a dozen people remain unaccounted for.

At least 11 people have been killed in a landslide in Shovi, northern Georgia, on Thursday afternoon (3 August). Immediately after the disaster struck around 70 people were moved to a safe area, and according to a statement from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, two border police helicopters and around 400 rescuers had been deployed in the first night of the rescue operation.

600 square kilometres in Ukraine's southern Kherson region have been flooded after the Nova Kakhovka dam collapsed in the early hours of Tuesday (6 June). This was announced by the region's governor, Oleksandr Produkin. Speaking on Telegram, Produkin also said 32% of the flooded area is on the Ukrainian controlled right bank and 68% on the Russian occupied left bank. The average water level in flooded areas is currently 5.61m, with the town of Oleshky being particularly badly affected. In total, 30 communities have been affected, according to Ukrainian officials. As of Thursday morning (8 June), 2,000 people have been evacuated from affected areas while some who are stranded on the roofs of their homes in Russian-controlled areas have received drinking water by drone, the governor said. There have also been reports of Russian forces shelling affected areas and even shooting at Ukrainians trying to rescue people affected by the floods. While thousands have been made homeless, Ukrainian officials have said that hundreds of thousands now have no access to clean water, and irrigation systems served by the Dnieper river have been swept away, seriously damaging fertile land that could take years to recover.

Russia has blown up a dam in southern Ukraine's Kherson region. This was reported by Ukraine's Southern Operational Command early in the morning on Tuesday (6 June). The Soviet-era hydroelectric plant lies on the Dnipro river, next to the city of Nova Kakhovka and approximately 50km east of the city of Kherson. Videos have emerged online of a major breach towards the Russian-occupied side of the river, and there are already reports of flooding in dozens of towns and villages downstream. Ukrainska Pravda, citing a nearby resident, said there was a single explosion, after which the dam "collapsed like a house of cards." Ukrainian authorities say that approximately 16,000 people are in the critical zone, and evacuations have already begun. It is expected that flooding down stream will reach critical levels at around 11am local time. At 9am, Kherson Oblast governor Oleksandr Prokudin reported that the villages of Tyaginka, Lvove, Odradokamyanka, Ivanivka, Mykilske Tokarivka, Ponyativka, Bilozerka, and the Ostriv district in Kherson were "fully or partially flooded." Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called an emergency meeting of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, according to the council's head, Oleksii Danilov. 

An event on water dialogue between Armenian and Azerbaijani experts is taking place today in Tbilisi, Georgia, on Monday (6 March). In a Facebook post, Emin Milli, the Founder and Chairman of Restart Initiative and the Co-Founder of Daha Yaxşı, Restart Initiative's media project, revealed that the focus of the meeting is to establish what are the key challenges to Internal Water Resources Management at the bilateral transboundary basin level, and to explore potential areas of mutual interest and cooperation between Armenia and Azerbaijan. It is the third dialogue in the "Economic Connectivity: Armenia-Azerbaijan Dialogue Series" organised by the Restart Initiative in cooperation with the Hertie School, and sponsored by the United States of America. There will be a series of interviews with the participants of the dialogue published by Daha Yaxşı both this and next week. In today's meeting, one of the participants said, "we all will be losers if we don’t cooperate."

"Notwithstanding years of global negligence, the conflict in Yemen has made climate change no less of a threat to Yemen than the pandemic and the violence caused by conflict," writes Faisal Alshamiry in this op-ed for commonspace.eu. He discusses the climate situation, the biggest risks, and offers some suggestions for how Yemen can mitigate the effects of climate change that represent just as much an existential threat to the country as the ongoing war. Discussions of climate change and environmental crises in Yemen are increasing in both local and international contexts. Yemen is known to be among the most arid places in the world and therefore one of the most vulnerable to climate change. In fact, during the past decade, the country has witnessed a higher rate of climate change in terms of water shortages and weather extremes, according to the World Bank. Moreover, low levels of land reclamation and migration out of farmlands are trends that further complicate the environmental challenges facing Yemeni society. To put this challenge into context, only 34% of the total land is agricultural, but the vast majority of this land is pastures, with only 3% being arable. Less than half of the arable land is actually cultivated.