Formed of rain and snowmelt pouring out of the mountains, this valley was once fertile between the craggy peaks of northwest Afghanistan.
But the climate has changed significantly in recent decades, locals say, rendering the land barren and people struggling for survival.
Many have fled, to neighbouring Iran or live in squalid poverty in camps for driven out of Afghanistan, as repeated droughts dry up farmland and pasture land.
“I remember from my childhood … there was a lot of snow in the winters, in spring we had a lot of rain,” said Abdul Ghani, 53, a community leader in Sang-e-Atash village in heavily afflicted Badghis province.
The frequency and severity of flooding also increased, having shifted from snow in early winter to rain in spring.
Today’s drought is the worst for decades.
In the last two decades, 14 per cent of the country’s glaciers have melted, said Assem Mayar, an expert on water resource management and doctoral student at Stuttgart University, while drought incidence was more than doubled in the last 20th years of the twentieth century.
“Climate change in Afghanistan is not an uncertain,”potential” potential “future risk, but a very real, current threat whose effects are already being felt by millions of farmers and cattle herders across the nation,” a 2016 report from the World Agriculture Program, the United Nations Environmental Program and the National Environmental Protection Agency said.
