ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq – Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid on Monday delivered a speech at the 2025 UN Ocean Conference, warning against the impacts of climate change on ocean health and its detriments to the international community as well as Iraq.

The Iraqi president and First Lady Shanaz Ibrahim Ahmed left for France on Sunday in order to participate in the conference taking place in Nice, where they were joined by Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein.

Rashid initially represented the G77 group at the UN, consisting of Iraq and 76 other developing countries, where he voiced the group’s “deep concern” over the “accelerating degradations of marine ecosystem, marine pollution, including plastic and chemical runoff,” adding, “We are particularly alarmed by the disproportionate impact of the climate change on ocean health and its cascading effects.”

Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid on Monday delivered a speech at the 2025 UN Ocean Conference in France's Nice, on behalf of G77 pic.twitter.com/0b79Q8CJsS

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The president then read out Iraq’s statement to the participants, where he noted that the challenges faced by the country, particularly the “depletion of water in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers due to several effects, including climate change.”

The Iraqi president, a former water resources minister, has repeatedly highlighted combating water scarcity as one of the main priorities on his agenda as president of Iraq.

“Ocean security is no longer an environmental issue but a matter of international and humanitarian security for many countries, especially those that suffer from degradation of water resources,” the Iraqi leader highlighted.

Iraq has long struggled with water scarcity, but the issue has become more prominent in recent times. Speaking to The New Region in May, Iraqi parliament member Hassan Wariush al-Asadi said Iraq’s current water storage has dropped to about 9 billion cubic meters, down sharply from 26 billion cubic meters at the same time last year.

The crisis has forced the country “to cancel the summer agricultural plan entirely to save water for drinking and other essential needs,” Asadi added.

Rashid also listed “the lack of a uniform administrative and legal policy for cross-border rivers and the decline of our water revenues from source countries” as depleting the country’s water resources. Upstream dams constructed by Turkey along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have exacerbated Iraq’s already dire water shortages by significantly reducing water flow into Iraq.