Water Crisis

The purpose of this study is to investigate the level of attention to the environmental crisis issue in elementary school textbooks. The method is Shannon entropy. The unit of analysis contains texts, activities, and images that 3961 pages were totally reviewed. The statistical population consisted of elementary school books and all of them were selected as samples. The components and indicators of the environmental crisis were extracted from documents and earlier sources and checked out in the books. The research content validity was obtained using CVR which was 0.90 and confirmed, and the reliability was 0.98 based on the agreement coefficient. Findings have shown that in elementary books, a total of 68 cases were referred to the environmental crisis; 19 cases were related to the soil crisis, 18 cases were related to water, 18 of them were related to noise crisis and 13 subjects were related to air crisis. Also, the highest coefficient of importance was related to the soil crisis component (0.411) and the lowest coefficient of importance was related to the air crisis component (0.204). Among the textbooks; science books dealt with the environmental crisis more than any other book. In the next place were the Farsi books (reading) and finally the social studies books. No other cases for the attention to the environmental crisis were observed in the other elementary school textbooks.

Environmental sustainability and human settlement are tightly intertwined with water. Therefore, water has had a history-maker function throughout the history of ties between human communities and politico-spatial units. Over the past decades, water consumption has increased in parallel with a reduction in the levels of these strategic resources, thereby orientating the hydro politics-based foreign policy of nations, particularly in low-precipitation regions. In this vein, Iraq’s geographical position is such that several seasonal and permanent rivers running in western Iran flow into its western neighbor, providing for water supply security in some eastern regions of that country. Over the past one and a half-decade, drought-stricken Iran has moved to harvest water flowing out across its western borders, which has consequently reduced water inflow into Iraq and stirred up hydropolitical tensions between the two nations. This research aims to identify effective driving forces in transforming hydropolitical tensions to water cooperation between Iran and Iraq. The functional data required for this research has been gathered by the library-survey method (interview and expert forum) to be analyzed with a combined quantitative-qualitative approach and applying structural analysis. The research found that water diplomacy has a strategic role in reducing hydropolitical tensions.

The current research explores the water crisis and the security in the Middle East region. It ad-dresses the challenges and solutions in terms of lack of available fresh water resources and its unbalanced distribution in the face of increase in water demand as a result of the industrializa-tion of societies, population growth and negative effects of climate change which leads to the occurrence of water scarcity and turning it into a global crisis. Hence, concerns about the lack of water resources in the world in recent decades have led to two general speculations about the future. Relations between governments should be formed around international water resources. One hand, there are those who predict that in the near future, water will be a reason for creating violent conflicts between governments. On the other hand, there are writers and theoreticians who believe in the "catalytic" nature of water for the approximation of governments and more cooperation in this field. The issue of water has emerged both in the form of war and coopera-tion. In the meantime, the need for water in the dry and water-scarce region of the Middle East, the weakness of the international water cooperation systems and the numerous political-economic and social tensions in it, have created the arena for the emergence of water-related security threats in this region.