The United Nations is still short of nearly $24 million to fund the rescue of an abandoned oil tanker off the coast of war-torn Yemen, the UN said Thursday. It hopes to begin the operation to prevent an oil spill in the Red Sea by the end of May.
“It is urgent that this gap be closed to successfully carry out the operation,” Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for the UN secretary-general, told reporters after a virtual donor conference hosted by the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
In March, the UN announced that it had purchased a huge tanker to be able to transfer the equivalent of just over one million barrels of crude oil from the FSO Safer anchored off the strategic port of Hodeida (western Yemen), which experts say could break up, explode or catch fire at any moment. The supertanker Nautica is currently en route to the region.
Despite the lack of funds, “we still believe that the water operation can start before the end of the month,” Farhan Haq told AFP, noting that the UN has “internal funding mechanisms” to wait for additional donations. This unprecedented operation for the United Nations, whose cost has exploded, has been estimated at a total of 148 million dollars: 129 million for the rescue, plus 19 million for the second phase, which includes towing the Safer once it has been emptied and securing the Nautica.
With an additional 5.6 million pledged on Thursday, total donations now stand at 105.2 million, leaving a shortfall of 23.8 million for the rescue phase. “The justification for action is clear: 20 million dollars now could save 20 billion in potential costs later,” commented in a statement Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which is at the forefront of this issue, also emphasizing the “moral” justifications for sparing the region’s populations.
Built in 1976, the FSO Safer, which serves as a floating storage and offloading terminal, has not been maintained since 2015 as Yemen has been plunged into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises due to the war between the government and Houthi rebels. According to the UN, the Safer contains four times the amount of oil of the Exxon Valdez, the tanker that caused one of the biggest environmental disasters in the history of the United States in 1989.
In the event of an oil spill, the UN estimates the cost of clean-up alone at 20 billion dollars and highlights the potential catastrophic environmental, economic and humanitarian consequences. For example, 1.7 million people in Yemen depend on the fishing industry, which would be devastated, and several ports carrying food to the population may have to close. “We are on the verge of being able to respond to the Safer threat (…) But we can only breathe a sigh of relief when the job is done,” stressed David Gressly, UN coordinator for Yemen.
