Iraq
Iraq, officially the Republic of Iraq, is a country in the Middle East.
The country is bordered by Turkey to the north, Iran to the east, the Persian Gulf and Kuwait to the southeast, Saudi Arabia to the south, Jordan to the southwest and Syria to the west.
The capital and largest city is Baghdad.
Why it is in news?
Iraqi government bodies and a United Nations agency started a project to grow up to 4 million mangrove trees in the Khor al-Zubair mudflats region, located near major oil fields.
Iraq's carbon emissions have more than doubled over the past decade, according to the World Bank, making it one of the region's worst polluters when measured against the size of its economy.
The tidal flats south of Basra are a baking landscape of water, salt, mud and hazy sky, riven by channels.
The smoke in the distance is billowing from a petrochemical plant near Zubair oil field, some 20 kilometers (13 miles) away, part of a vast energy sector that provides the bulk of Iraq's income and is the main industry - and polluter - in the Basra area.
Southern Iraq was once known for rich marshes that were drained decades ago in an environmental catastrophe that wrecked a complex ecosystem and pushed many of its inhabitants to ruin.
Planting mangroves on the tidal flats, south of where the marshes once lay, can protect coastal communities from storms and floods and create a new home for threatened species without using any of Iraq's scarce freshwater for irrigation.
The scheme was inspired by successful projects to rehabilitate mangrove forests in nearby Kuwait and in the United Arab Emirates at the other end of the Gulf.
COMMENTS