Iraq's water resources heavily depend on the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, which serve as surface water resources, as well as several fertile groundwater aquifers. Nonetheless, Iraq has shift from a water-secure to a water-stressed country over the last 30 years due to a combination of reasons, including:

• Neighboring countries’ development projects upstream from the Tigris-Euphrates, affecting quality and quantity of the water flow. 
• Centralized and complicated governance of water, together with inadequate regulatory framework and enforcement. 
• Reduced water use efficiency, with 75 per cent used in irrigation. 
• Seventy-five per cent of irrigated land in central and southern Iraq is affected by salinization.  
• Water contamination due to mainly untreated municipal and industrial wastewater discharge.
• Iraq is one of the most vulnerable countries of the Middle East to climate change. 

To address this challenge, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Netherlands, and MOWR has included Iraq in the second phase of the WaPOR project “Monitoring land and water productivity by Remote Sensing 2021-2025”. 

The project aligns with the second government priority of the FAO-Iraq Country Program Framework (CPF) 2018-2022: “Restoration of degraded agricultural land and higher productivity of water resources in agriculture” and the 4th strategic priority of “Promoting Natural Resource and Disaster Risk Management, and Climate Change Resilience" under the Iraq United Nations Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework 2020-2024. 

Project milestones:

December 2021: WaPOR phase 2 inception workshop in Baghdad
June 2022: WaPOR introductory training 
November 2022: field data collection and validation training
January 2023: data collection for crop mapping training