New water balance calculation for the Dead Sea

A press release from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research: The drinking water resources on the eastern, Jordanian side of the Dead Sea could decline severe as a result of climate change than those on the western, Israeli and Palestinian side. This is the conclusion reached by an international team of researchers that calculated the water flows around the Dead Sea. The natural replenishment rate of groundwater will reduce dramatically in the future if precipitation lowers as predicted, say the scientists, writing in the journal Science of the Total Environment. Even now, the available groundwater resources in the region are not sufficient to meet the growing water requirements of the population and agriculture. If the situation worsens, it could therefore have serious social, economic and ecological consequences for the region.

A reliable inventory of existing water resources around the Dead Sea, on the border between Israel, Palestine and Jordan, forms the basis for sustainable water management. The lowest lake on earth is not only one of the biggest tourist attractions in the Middle East; more than four million people rely on the groundwater resources in its catchment basin. For a long time, the complex hydrology of this region presented major unknown factors in the local water balance equation. To some extent it still does. Thanks to improved computer simulations, the researchers were able to
work out – on an international scale for the first time – how much water actually infiltrates from rainfall and replenishes the groundwater reservoir: around 281 million cubic metres per year. This means that we now also know what the maximum withdrawal limit should be if this resource is to be managed sustainably.

... Using the models, the scientists were able, for the first time, to make predictions about possible future changes in the groundwater resources that are so vital for this region: the western (Israeli–Palestinian) side of the lake receives almost twice as much rainfall as the eastern (Jordanian) side. As a result, groundwater replenishment rates are currently around 50 per cent higher on the western side. Climate scenarios predict a decrease in annual rainfall of around 20 per cent. However, the water that currently ends up underground and replenishes these important groundwater resources would be halved. The decrease on the western Israeli–Palestinian side is expected to be around 45 per cent, whereas the water available for the Jordanian (eastern) side would fall by nearly 55 per cent. The social and economic situation could therefore worsen, in Jordan in particular.

Saving and reusing water could therefore be a solution, and the UFZ researchers are developing this concept further with colleagues from Israel, Palestine and Jordan. For instance, the SMART project researched ways of stabilising water supply in the Middle East. The UFZ developed new concepts for decentralised wastewater treatment and made a significant contribution to the water master plan of Jordan, one of the world’s most arid countries. Great importance was attached to adapting the wastewater treatment concept to local conditions, and to collaborating with local scientists and authorities. A special implementation office was set up in Jordan’s Ministry of Water in Amman....

Sinkholes and surface springs in Samar (Western Dead Sea), the Jordan flank of the Dead Sea is visible in the background. Photo: Dr. Christian Siebert/UFZ

Jordan pins water hopes on controversial pipeline project

IRIN: Jordan, one of the world’s most water scarce states, is facing a “perfect storm of pressures” including chronic scarcity, over-use, waste, and a massive increase in demand caused by refugee arrivals, according to a report published this month by the NGO Mercy Corps. To add to the water stress, the country is currently undergoing its driest rainy season in decades.

One proposed solution is due to be implemented by mid-2018 following Jordan’s signing of a controversial water sharing agreement with Israel and the Palestinian authorities in December 2013 after decades of discussions.

The agreement paves the way for the long-discussed Red Sea Dead Sea Water Conveyer (RSDSWC) project, though in a much reduced form. It includes the construction of a desalination plant at the Jordanian port of Aqaba, which will desalinate 800-1,000 million cubic metres (mcm) per year shared by participating countries, and the pumping of brine to revive the Dead Sea via a 180km pipeline/canal.

According to the Ministry of Water and Irrigation, Jordan will have chosen the contractor by April 2015, construction will begin at the end of 2015, and implementation will last almost 2.5 years. “With this, we will have solved Jordan’s problems at least for the next 30 years,” said Nabeel Zoubi, programme manager for the Red-Dead Sea programme at the ministry.

The plant is expected to produce at least 80 mcm every year, according to Zoubi. “Israel will buy approximately 50 mcm from Jordan at a cost of US$0.42 per cubic metre and the rest - approximately 30-40 mcm - will go to Jordan’s governorate of Aqaba,” Zoubi added....

Bab El Mandeb, South gate of the Red Sea, owner unknown, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Israelis outraged by EU official comparison of Israeli and Palestinian water allocation

Al-Jazeera,com: Comments made by the president of the European Parliament, in which he criticised Israeli settlements and implied that Israelis receive four times more water than Palestinians, has stoked anger in Israel.

The speech, made by German Martin Schulz on Wednesday, prompted the far-right Jewish Home party to storm out of the parliament and the spat made the front pages of Israel's main newspapers. Economy Minister Naftali Bennett warned against Germans criticising his country, in reference to the European country's Nazi past.

...A European Union source who declined to be named said it was hard to find a more pro-Israeli politician in Europe than Schulz, and that he was "shaken" by a controversy that had overshadowed what was meant to be a positive message.

..."How can it be that an Israeli is allowed to use 70 litres of water per day, but a Palestinian only 17?" Schulz asked. The municipal water consumption per capita per day in Israel in 2011 was 250 litres, while among Palestinians in the West Bank ... it was 70 litres.

...The spat prompted several NGOs to publish their own figures on water usage, with Friends of the Earth Middle East citing statistics from 2011 showing the ratio was close to four to one. "The municipal water consumption per capita per day in Israel in 2011 was 250 litres, while among Palestinians in the West Bank, after taking into consideration an average loss of approximately 30 percent of the water - due to theft and lack of infrastructure - it was 70 litres," the group said.

Israeli rights group B'Tselem also said there was "discrimination in water allocation", with Israelis receiving "much more water than Palestinian residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip"....

The Gaza Strip viewed from a NASA satellite

Despite rains, Dead Sea water levels falls again in December

Space Daily via UPI: Despite rainstorms that have soaked fields and filled reservoirs in Israel during December, the Dead Sea's water level still dropped, water researchers said.

Eli Raz, a researcher at the Dead Sea and Arava Science Center in Ketura said the Dead Sea fell to 427.82 meters (1,403 feet) below sea level in early January, 3 centimeters (slightly more than an inch) lower than the level measured the previous month, the Jerusalem Post reported Wednesday.

In comparison, Lake Kinneret saw an increase of 11 centimeters (slightly more than 4 inches) during the same period. The additional drop in the Dead Sea's water level brought the basin to 0.93 meters (3 feet) below its level one year ago, Hydrological Services data indicated.

The slow in the sea's water-level decrease last month was due in part to rainy conditions and lower temperatures that slowed the evaporation rate, Raz said....

Image of the Dead Sea by xta11, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license

Dead Sea, Red Sea plan raises environmental hackles

Terra Daily via AFP: A plan to link the Red Sea with the shrinking Dead Sea could save it from total evaporation and bring desalinated water to thirsty neighbours Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians. But environmentalists warn that the "Red-Dead" project could have dire consequences, altering the unique chemistry of the landmark inland lake at the lowest point on earth.

Jordanian Prime Minister Abdullah Nsur said on Monday that his government had decided to press ahead with the 980-million dollar project which would give the parched Hashemite kingdom 100 million cubic metres (3.5 billion cubic feet) of water a year.

"The government has approved the project after years of technical, political, economic and geological studies," Nsur told a news conference. Under the plan, Jordan will draw water from the Gulf of Aqaba at the northern end of the Red Sea to the nearby Risheh Height, where a desalination plant is to be built to treat water.

"The desalinated water will go south to (the Jordanian town of) Aqaba, while salt water will be pumped to the Dead Sea," Nsur said. The Dead Sea, the world's saltiest body of water, is on course to dry out by 2050.

It started shrinking in the 1960s when Israel, Jordan and Syria began to divert water from the Jordan River, the Dead Sea's main tributary....

On Israel's shore of the Dead Sea, xta11, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license

Palestine establishes disaster loss database

Berta Acero in the news archive for the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction: The Government of Palestine supported by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) has taken steps to establish its first national disaster loss database. The initiative was launched in the presence of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction and UNISDR Chief, Margareta Wahlström, who began a visit to Palestine this week.

The consolidation of historical disaster loss data will provide critical baseline information on disaster losses that will inform risk sensitive development planning policies and programmes and strengthen community resilience to disasters. Ms. Wahlström presided over the launch in Ramallah alongside Dr. Said Abu-Ali, Minister of Interior, whose Ministry is leading disaster risk reduction efforts in the State of Palestine.  "The Palestinian Government is taking this workshop seriously to gain expertise and knowledge which will translate into action and support all sectors", said Dr. Said Abu-Ali.

Palestine is highly vulnerable to natural hazards, mainly earthquakes, floods, landslides, droughts and desertification. The whole region frequently faces small to mid-scale disasters and is vulnerable to large-scale urban disasters, triggered by seismic activity and climate change.

This January a winter storm struck the region and caused severe damage to the agriculture and infrastructure in the Northern West Bank. About 12,000 people across 190 communities were affected by this storm.

"The recent winter storm in January 2013 is a small early warning to all sectors that Palestine can be affected by weather related events that are beyond the usual patterns," stated Dr Mohammad Abu-Ramadan, Minister of Planning and International Cooperation during his meeting with Ms. Wahlström. The January storm caused over $50 million in with severe damage to the agricultural sector...

The Gaza Strip in 2005, CIA photo

Palestinians fear for ancient West Bank water source

Tom Perry in Reuters: Hewn from rock, the cavernous cisterns which dot the desert beyond Bethlehem have for centuries harvested winter rain to provide shepherds and their flocks with water through summer.

Under a baking sun, an elderly Bedouin explains how cisterns he remembers from childhood, many of them restored to full working order in the last few years, are once again helping his goat-herding community to survive. That, he concludes, is why the Israeli authorities who control the West Bank have demolished at least three in the area since November. "Maybe they are doing this to make us leave. We will not leave," said Falah Hedawa, 64, sitting on cushions in his tent home pitched in the hills that slope down to the Dead Sea.

Out into the desert, a stagnant pool marked the spot where one of the cisterns, chiseled out of a hillside, had stood until its recent demolition. A mud trail on the otherwise dry ground indicated where the water inside had drained away toward a wadi, a valley which becomes a river when the rain falls.

Israel has demolished 20 rainwater collection cisterns in the West Bank in the first half of this year, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which monitors conditions in the Palestinian territories. Their razing is part of a marked acceleration in demolitions of Palestinian structures in "Area C" -- the 60 percent of the West Bank where Israel exercises total control....

Drawing wheat from cistern, Isdud, Palestine, around 1908, March 12

Water pacts 'could bring Mideast peace'

UPI: Water scarcity in the Middle East can be the catalyst for reducing, rather than causing, conflict in the volatile region, a Beirut think tank says in a report that urges a major "paradigm shift" in how regional states view the problem of dwindling water resources.

The report entitled "The Blue Peace: Rethinking Middle East Water," issued by the Carnegie Middle East Center, suggests that a radical "paradigm shift" is needed to change how these states view the political and environmental issues at the core of the water crisis, a region-wide approach rather than the piecemeal, largely bilateral, efforts made so far that have achieve almost nothing.

"It is possible … to anticipate conflict between countries due to disagreements over shared water resources," the report observed. "Indeed conventional thinking about water in the Middle East tends to be pessimistic and alarmist.

"The challenge is to rethink water in the Middle East, to treat it as an opportunity for peace and development," the Carnegie Middle East Center declared. The report focuses primarily on Israel, the Palestinian Territories, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Turkey, a choice "governed by the potential of opportunities to rethink water."

The purpose is to develop "a common political framework for the future, for sustainable management of water resources across several basins and not a negotiating platform for dividing water resources in any individual basin or aquifer." The report, released Thursday in Beirut, envisions these states establishing a monitoring system through which they can collaborate and determine a more equitable sharing of water resources in the region….

Solomon's Pools and ancient aqueducts, near Jerusalem. Inflow of Wadi el-Biyar aqueduct into the upper pool, between 1934 and 1939

Greece, Turkey spearhead efforts to fight climate change in the Mediterranean

Kostis Geropoulos in New Europe: Greece and Turkey may disagree on many issues but are brought together in the fight against global warming. Athens and Ankara agreed on 22 October to join forces to combat climate change in the Mediterranean.

In an idyllic setting at a luxury south coast resort near Vouliagmeni, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, together with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Maltese Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi, Palestinian National Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, as well as environmental representatives from neighboring Mediterranean countries signed a political declaration on 22 October. The agreement launches the Mediterranean Climate Change Initiative (MCC) in collaboration with leaders from across the Mediterranean and with the support of the European Investment Bank (EIB), which aims to accelerate environmental cooperation in the region, protect the fragile ecosystem and promote and implement low-carbon development projects in the region.

…The deputy foreign minister reminded that the Mediterranean Green Development Investors Forum was due to take place here on 23 October on the subject of “Financing profitable green initiatives and investments across the Mediterranean.” The forum was expected to allow key policy-makers, technology providers, business and finance leaders and international investors to discuss the initiatives and investments for a sustainable green economy across the Mediterranean. Kouvelis said business and investment can give a further impetus to the whole effort in the fight against climate change and Green Development.

…Opening the Mediterranean Climate Change Initiative conference, Papandreou said that from within the "bad scenarios" for climate change appearing to be coming true in the southeastern Mediterranean with increasingly frequent extreme weather phenomena and threats to the region's unique agricultural production, "which is a capital for its culture," an opportunity arises that of taking advantage of the cooperation among the regional countries "to develop a new growth model, making use of the region's resources, to create new green industries."

Near Vouliagmeni, shot by Charski A.V.

Climate catastrophe and Israel's denial of Palestinian access to water

Javier Sethness in Dissident Voice: Amnesty International has recently released two reports on Israeli water policy that present a rather thoroughgoing indictment of the Zionist colonization project broadly conceived. Entitled “Thirsting for Justice: Palestinian Access to Water Restricted” and “Troubled Waters: Palestinians Denied Fair Access to Water,” the reports join many other studies of both more and less recent memory that have provided similar perspectives critical of Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinian people. In the reports, Amnesty finds the Israeli state to be fundamentally violating the right to water of the 4 million Palestinians living under its ongoing military occupation, and hence also to be massively violating Palestinians’ right to an adequate standard of living. It seems important to consider that this aspect of Israel’s active deprivation of the Palestinian people in many ways mirrors and previews the acute deprivation of much of the world’s population that capitalist societies are enacting through their contributions to dangerous anthropogenic interference with the Earth’s climate

For those familiar with the present situation in Palestine, Amnesty’s reports may not prove to be terribly surprising; they are, however, no less offensive and shocking for all that. Amnesty finds that Israelis consume over 80 percent of the water available in the so-called Mountain Aquifer that lies beneath the West Bank, leaving the remaining 20 percent for the 2.3 million West Bank-residing Palestinians.

...The water situation in Palestine, then, is monstrous, just as is much else related to the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine. Indeed, Israeli water policy is reminiscent of what Salih Booker and William Minter refer to in a different context as global apartheid,1 and in this sense parallels many similar horrors of the contemporary world. One of the most pressing such parallels that bears mention here is that of climate change.

… It is in the destruction by Israel of Palestinian cisterns and water-treatment plants as in its rendering of entire Palestinian communities into environmental refugees through the wholesale cutting-off of their access to water that can be seen a few of the likely realities of the totality toward which the world is moving as a result of climate change….

The Gaza Strip in May 2005, NASA

UN will send post-conflict environmental team to Gaza

Environment News Service: The United Nations is preparing to send a post-conflict assessment team into the Gaza Strip in early May to determine the impact of the recent conflict with Israel on the region's environment and infrastructure. Early UN assessments show that damage to infrastructure has led to increased discharge of raw sewage into groundwater supplies and the Mediterranean Sea, posing a problem for authorities and the public in Gaza and potentially also in Israel.

…The team will include up to eight UNEP and international independent experts in areas of water and waste water management, asbestos and hazardous wastes monitoring, coastal and marine environmental assessment and institutional and economic evaluation.

Their work follows the early recovery needs assessment led by the UN Development Programme. A few days after the cease-fire in January 2009, a UNEP expert was deployed to the Gaza Strip to make an initial assessment of the environmental impacts as part of the UNDP-led Early Recovery and Reconstruction Assessment.…These early assessments identified areas in need of more extensive, investigation following the conflict in December 2008 and January 2009 including:

• Solid Waste Management: The recent conflict created large quantities of building demolition waste, which is often contaminated with hazardous materials such as asbestos. Even before the most recent conflict, Gaza did not have an appropriate system for waste segregation and disposal. Now, the creation of such a large quantity of solid waste has overloaded the already inadequate infrastructure.

• Waste Water Management: The Gaza Strip lacked an adequate sewerage system prior to the most recent conflict and damage of the existing sewerage infrastructure further aggravated an already serious public health situation. Detailed analysis of the impact on ground water will be required.

• Management of Contaminated Land: Small-scale industries, such as factories, cement works and garages were struck during the conflict. This has created numerous potentially contaminated sites within the urban environment....

January 2009, a destroyed mosque in the Gaza Strip, photo by ISM Palestine, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License

The Red Sea might save the Dead Sea

Douglas Hamilton writes in Reuters: Abundant water from the Red Sea could replenish the shrinking Dead Sea if Jordan, Israel and the Palestinians decide to commission a tunnel north through the Jordanian desert from the Gulf of Aqaba.

The Red Sea-Dead Sea Water Conveyance project would supply the biggest desalination plant in the world, running on its own hydro-electric power and providing Jordan with enough water for the next 40-50 years. Israel and the Palestinian West Bank would also benefit. A decision on whether to go ahead could come by the end of next year and the likely cost would be in the region of 7 billion dollars.

"The idea of linking the Red Sea and the Dead Sea was first suggested by a British military engineer in the 1880s. That was for hydro-power. But the drivers today are water supply and saving the Dead Sea," said engineer David Meehan , who leads the study team for French consultants Coyne et Bellier. "Technically and engineering-wise it was always going to be feasible," he told Reuters. "But there are some major issues that could determine its feasibility ultimately."

… The main concerns are the effects on marine life in the Gulf of Aqaba of the extraction of such large volumes of water, the effects of that water mixing with the Dead Sea, and the funding of the project, said Meehan. In addition, Israel has concerns about potential leakage polluting valuable freshwater aquifers in a desert region where it has developed world-leading techniques for cultivation, and "environmentalists don't like the idea of canals which cut off wildlife migration."

The Palestinians have not even asked formally for a share of the desalinated water, he said, possibly because they do not want to prejudice their existing claims to mountain aquifers" supplying the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Jordan Valley. "None of these issues can be separated from politics," he said, although both Jordan and Israel say they could go it alone. But that could involve a dispute in international law and funding would become scarce….

Salt covered stones in the Dead Sea, shot by xta11