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WATER POLITICS

Via Yale’s e360 online magazine, a strong report on the challenges and opportunities facing Israel, Jordan, and Syria as they take serious steps to rescue the 205-mile Jordan river, a looming ecological catastrophe that has been overshadowed by decades of war and regional conflict.  As the article notes:

“…Steadily drained over the past half century to quench the thirst and grow the crops of the people of Israel, Jordan, Syria, and the Palestinian territories, the Jordan River has been dealt a deathblow recently by a severe drought and by yet another tributary dam, this one on the Jordanian-Syrian border.

In recent years, all that saved much of the lower Jordan from becoming a desiccated channel has been the agricultural runoff, raw human sewage, diverted saline spring water, and contaminated wastes from fish farms that have been pumped into it. But now even that effluent barely restores a flow to the Jordan, the river where Jesus Christ was baptized and which has long been a vital stopover on the migratory pathway of tens of millions of birds en route between Europe and Africa.

…The story of the depletion of the Jordan is hardly unique. Around the world, human activity has pulled so much water out of great rivers — the Indus on the Indian subcontinent, the Yellow in China, the Rio Grande along the U.S.-Mexico border — that they now either disappear before reaching the sea or contain long sections that seasonally run dry. The underlying reason is always the same: We view rivers not as valuable in themselves, supplying vital “ecosystem services” to people, fish, animals, and plants, but rather as merely tools for humans and economic development.

That was certainly the case in the early days of the formation of Israel, when the dream of nation building was to “make the desert bloom.” In the 1950s, that dream was married to advanced engineering as Israel’s National Water Carrier diverted about a third of the original flow of the Jordan to Tel Aviv and the farms of the Negev Desert. Subsequent Israeli water withdrawals, coupled with scores of dam and canal projects on tributaries in Syria and Jordan, claimed the rest of the river’s water. For ages, the Sea of Galilee has fed the longest stretch of the river, the lower Jordan, but today not a drop of fresh water flows out of the sea into the river. The largest tributary to the lower Jordan, the Yarmouk River, has similarly had all its waters diverted by Syria and Jordan. As these insults to the Jordan have accumulated, water disputes in this rain-starved region have grown ever more contentious, with unequal water allocations — coupled with violence and occupation —becoming a powerful human rights issue and an additional source of animosity.

Just as the Jordan is hitting bottom, another troubling development is unfolding. The World Bank has selected two consulting firms to study the feasibility of pumping water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea, the terminus of the Jordan River, via a massive and staggeringly expensive pipeline. Because of the Jordan’s catastrophic reduction in flows — from a historic level of 1.3 billion cubic meters annually to only about 70,000 cubic meters now — the surface area of the Dead Sea has shrunk by a third in the past 50 years and the level of the sea, the world’s lowest point, is dropping by a meter a year. Rather than tackling the root problem destroying the river and draining the Dead Sea — which would require restoring flows to the Jordan — the World Bank, supported by Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority, is throwing its weight behind a huge public works project that could easily cost $5 billion to $10 billion and will likely have damaging ecological consequences.

The so-called Red-Dead project would be rendered obsolete if nations bordering the Jordan would begin putting water back into the river. But with regional governments taking little action, Friends of the Earth Middle East has stepped in to push for measures that will gradually return water to the Jordan. Our approach is two-pronged: The first is a program called Good Water Neighbors, in which we work with nine river communities — four Jordanian, three Israeli, and two Palestinian, all located on opposite banks — to conserve water and educate people about the value of the Jordan and its wetlands. The second, and more challenging, task is to persuade national leaders to make the tough choices that will revitalize the Jordan: charging more for water, removing large subsidies to agricultural water users, and adopting large-scale conservation programs.

…What is needed now is action from the Israeli and Jordanian governments, hopefully to be joined in the near future by Syria. They could start by creating an international commission to manage the Jordan, similar to the commissions that govern North America’s Great Lakes and Europe’s Rhine River. Regional governments and international donor states, including the U.S., also need to take a hard look at the proposed Red Sea-Dead Sea canal, a potential boondoggle that could cause major problems, including mixing the marine water of the Red Sea with the fresh water of the Dead Sea, which could change the composition of the Dead Sea and cause algal blooms. The wiser, and far cheaper, alternative is to revive the Dead Sea by restoring its main source of water — the Jordan River…”