DUBAI, February 5. /TASS/. As many as 21 million people in Afghanistan currently do not have access to clean drinking water due to climate change, a phenomena that has ravaged the country after decades of war, Abdul Salam Haqqani, deputy director of the Environmental Protection Agency of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (the name of the state used by the radical Taliban movement banned in Russia), said.

"[Some] 21 million people in Afghanistan lack access to clean drinking water because of climate change," the Bakhtar news agency quoted him as saying. Haqqani added that climate change is causing "severe damage" to Afghanistan after decades of warfare in the country.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), lack of drinking water is one of the obvious consequences of climate change in Afghanistan. According to the OCHA, Afghanistan suffered the worst drought in 30 years in 2023, which has severely degraded the quality of drinking water in 30 of the country's provinces, putting the majority of Afghans at risk of various diseases. Due to the prolonged drought, 42% of the country's water resources have dried up, while 75% of the land in the northern, western and southern regions is turning into desert, jeopardizing Afghanistan's food security.

Last December, in a report on desertification, UN experts named Afghanistan, Mainland Southeast Asia, Equatorial Africa and some regions of South and Central Asia as the most vulnerable to droughts.