The influx of Syrian refugees in the Kurdistan of Iraq and together with the IDP population have put huge pressures on the local environment, and have degraded the ecological resource base in Iraq. The added burden in the form of accumulated solid waste and improper disposal of waste go far beyond the local capacities to manage effectively. Furthermore, attacks on large water dams and industrial sites, have cause widespread chemical and radiation pollution. The conditions in terms of poor sanitation and water contamination pose high risks of infectious diseases in the refugee camps.
The id:rc was just contracted by the UNDP to quantify such environmental impacts and link them to the ongoing conflicts, and to develop a remediation and restoration plan for affected areas. This will be carried out through field investigations of select areas that are known to have been impacted, collecting and analyzing relevant data, and conducting inferences on the data to identify the key environmental components affected and the extent to which they have been affected. Based on this, a remediation plan based on those observations and measurements will be developed and formulated.