On September 27, the remnants of Hurricane Helene struck southern Appalachia, bringing torrential floods that devastated large swathes of the region and left hundreds dead and missing. While Appalachia is no stranger to deadly floods, Helene’s unprecedented rainfall and the destruction it wrought on an area previously marketed as a “climate haven” has served as a wake-up call about the challenges the region faces under climate change.
In adapting to this new climate reality, Appalachia will need to draw not only on its people’s ingenuity and self-reliance, but on the knowledge and friendship of similarly-affected areas around the world. And when it comes to under-resourced mountain regions with a history of coping with torrential flooding, no place may be a better friend to Appalachia than the Middle East country of Yemen.
To understand why this is, it’s worth reviewing what challenges Appalachia is expected to face over the next century of climate change. And according to scientists, one of the main things the region can expect amid a warming climate is intensity.
“Water stored in the atmosphere changes as a function of air temperature,” said Dr. Nicolas Zegre, Director of West Virginia University’s Mountain Hydrology Laboratory. “For every one degree increase in air temperature, the atmosphere can hold about 4% more water. This manifests on the ground in the intensification of the water cycle.”
This intensification has already made precipitation in Appalachia more extreme. At some places in certain times, it makes things dangerously dry. But it also means that when it rains it pours, increasing the risk of floods.
“The amount of rain in each hour of rainfall, almost everywhere, is increasing. One of the stations in Huntington, West Virginia showed rainfall has increased by about 28% since the 1970s,” Zegre said.
Mitigating and adapting to these fluctuating extremes will likely require significant changes in Appalachia’s infrastructure and land use, even as the region struggles with a declining population and few economic resources.
And that is where Yemen can help.
An Arabic-speaking country located some 7,000 miles from the United States, Yemen is probably not the first place one thinks of when thinking of Appalachia. But it maybe should be. With around 70% of Yemen’s roughly 30 million people living in the country’s western highlands, Yemenis share a lot in common with Appalachians; from a strong sense of independence and community to great pride in where they come from, despite its challenges. Despite its recent tragedies, including a decade-long civil war and the ongoing US bombing campaign targeting its Houthi rebels, Yemen is an old, proud country with a history stretching back over 2,500 years to the Kingdom of Sheba.
Indeed, it is from this history that Appalachia might learn valuable lessons about how to confront the future. In recent millennia, Yemen has had a much more intense water cycle than Appalachia. Located on the edge of the Arabian Desert, for about half the year much of Yemen conforms to the stereotype of the Middle East as a very dry place, and it consistently ranks as one of the world’s most water-scarce countries.
However, this rapidly changes during Yemen’s two rainy seasons. Situated in the path of moisture-heavy monsoon systems, twice a year the country is struck by torrential rains, with some areas like Sana’a receiving three-fourths of their annual precipitation over the course of about six months. For comparison, on average north-central West Virginia received just over half of its annual precipitation in its six wettest months between 1981 and 2010.
“The rainfall in Yemen, it comes very intense in a short period of time, and that’s why the floods are always there,” explained Dr. Musaed Aklan, a Senior Researcher focused on water and the environment at the Yemeni-led Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies.
These floods can be both thrilling and terrifying, with previously bone-dry valleys swelling with water almost eight feet deep over an afternoon. To watch them is to witness the raw power of nature.
Crucially however, this is a power Yemenis have learned to harness. Some 5,000 years ago, Yemenis began building intricate systems of terraces, dams, and canals that allowed them to channel these dramatic floods for agriculture. In fact, the lush greenery watered by the floodwaters was so striking to the ancient Romans that they called Yemen Arabia Felix, or “Happy Arabia”.
While much has changed over the past five millennia, and the old ways of flood management have come under threat in recent decades due to increased reliance on limited groundwater, these ancient techniques are still in use today for Appalachians to learn from.
One of the most striking and important of these techniques are Yemen’s iconic terraces, carved into hillsides by farmers. In addition to creating flat land for farming, these terraces slow and capture rainwater, helping mitigate flooding by reducing runoff. Although Appalachia may not be able to build such an elaborate landscape, terraces do draw attention to the region’s need for ground cover, especially forests, to help reduce run-off.
“Our forests exert a very important control over the release of water,” Zegre said. “When we remove the forests through urbanization, agriculture, or timber harvesting, or surface mining, we fundamentally change how much of that precipitation is gonna end up in the stream.”
The other major water management technique in Yemen is the country’s decentralized network of small community-managed check dams and spate irrigation diversion channels that reduce water flow in valleys (wadi in Arabic), a stark contrast to Appalachia’s reliance on larger state-run reservoirs.
“You can imagine there is a wadi from one or two kilometers and every 300 meters there are small barriers that take water to nearby lands. This is much more effective than big dams,” Aklan explained.
More than any particular technique though, Yemen’s most important lesson for Appalachia may be to keep an open mind and build the community ties that will be necessary to weather the coming storm.
“Learn from areas and countries that have faced these problems for decades. I believe there is a wealth of knowledge and effective tools they can learn from,” Aklan said. “Build strong local collaboration. Without local collaboration it will be difficult to get a solution from outside…without a strong voice from locals themselves.”
While Yemen has much to teach Appalachia about dealing with floods, climate solidarity is a two-way street, and Yemen has its own problems. One of the poorest countries in the world, devastated by a decade of conflict, and facing the same water cycle intensification as Appalachia but with far fewer resources, Yemen is facing its own new climate reality.
Aklan says what that has meant is more intense rainfall and flooding, but other natural disasters as well.
“Within the last six years in Yemen we had six cyclones, when previously we had four in twenty years,” he said. Just a month before Hurricane Helene, floods in Yemen killed over a hundred people and affected around half a million.
As evidenced by the case of Yemen, expanding Appalachia’s solidarity to other marginalized areas of the world can gain the region much-needed knowledge and allies in preparing for climate change. But, as in any community facing a common challenge, it also calls upon the region to help others.
And for Yemen, Aklan says that means using Appalachia’s relatively privileged position in the world’s most powerful country to help ensure access to resources to combat climate change for everyone.
“Not as something…that is a gift [from rich countries],” he said about climate financing. “No, it is something as a right…[Poorer, conflict affected countries] need some easy way to get climate finance.”
