The Middle East is running out of water

Some Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, Iraq and Jordan, pump large amounts of water from the ground for irrigation as they try to improve their food self-sufficiency, Charles Iceland, the world’s water director Resources Institute (WRI), he told CNN. This is happening as they experience a decrease in rainfall.

“They are using more water than is usually available through rain. Therefore, groundwater levels decrease as you draw water faster than resting rain,” he said.

This is what is happening in Iran, where a vast network of dams supports an agricultural sector that drinks approximately 90% of the water the country uses.

“Both declining rainfall and rising demand in these countries are causing many rivers, lakes and wetlands to dry up,” Iceland said.

The consequences of water scarcity are terrible: the areas could become uninhabitable; tensions over how to share and manage water resources such as rivers and lakes can worsen; more political violence could erupt.

In Iran, Urmia has been greatly reduced because many people have exploited it and some of the dams built in its basin mainly for irrigation have reduced the flow of water into the lake.

Iran’s water problems are already a deadly issue. In one week in July, at least three protesters were killed in clashes with security guards in demonstrations against water shortages in the southwest of the country.

According to the country’s weather service, the country is experiencing some of the driest conditions in five decades.

The winters in the Middle East are expected to be drier as the world warms, and although the summers will be rainier, the heat is expected to offset its water gains, according to the latest published scientific projections. earlier this month by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report.

“The problem is that with all this temperature rise, any precipitation that arrives evaporates because it’s very hot,” Mansour Almazroui, director of the Center for Excellence for Climate Change Research, told CNN. King Abdulaziz University of Saudi Arabia.

“The other thing is that” this rain will not necessarily be regular rain. There will be extreme rainfall, meaning that floods like the ones that happen in China, in Germany, in Belgium, these floods will be a big problem for the Middle East. This is really a big problem of climate change. “

A study by the Iranian Ministry of Energy found that the disappearance of the lake was more than 30% attributable to climate change.

These changes not only affect the amount of water available, but also the quality.

Lake Urmia is hypersaline, meaning it is very salty. As it has decreased, the salt concentration has increased and become so extreme, using it for irrigation harms farmers ’crops.

Kiomars Poujebeli, who grows tomatoes, sunflowers, sugar beet, eggplant and walnuts near the lake, told CNN the salt water has been disastrous.

“The day the ground will become unexploitable is not far off,” he said.

A vicious cycle

In Jordan, one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, people have become accustomed to living on very little water.

A study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that Jordanians will have to halve per capita water use by the end of the century. Most low-income Jordanians will live on 40 liters a day, for all their needs: drinking, bathing and washing clothes and crockery, for example. The average American uses about ten times that amount.

In many Jordanian homes, water is not necessarily available every day, said Daniel Rosenfeld, a professor in the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“Jordan now has a critical water shortage: water reaches Jordanian homes once or twice a week, even in the capital of Amman,” said Daniel Rosenfeld, a professor in the Atmospheric Sciences Program. the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The capital has existential problems right now, already, ”Rosenfeld said.

Groundwater levels in some parts of the country are falling by more than a meter a year, according to studies, and waves of refugees from many countries in the region have put additional pressure on the already stressed resource.

Jordanian Water Authority Secretary General Bashar Batayneh told CNN that the country needs more funding from the rest of the world to meet this rising water demand.

“Jordan has borne the brunt of the Syrian refugee crisis on behalf of the international community and has had a strong impact on water. The refugees have cost the water sector more than $ 600 million. year, while Jordan received a fraction of that amount from the international community, ”he said. .

He added that Jordan rained much less in 2020 than the previous year, putting more than a quarter of water resources at risk and halving drinking water sources.

But it’s not just climate change. The country is based on the Jordan River system, which also crosses Israel, the West Bank, Syria and Lebanon, and dams being built along the rivers have severely cut off the flow of water to Jordan. Jordan also uses canals to redirect river waters for irrigation. The conflict has spread several times around the river system in the past.

Jordan, Israel and Syria have improved coordination of the management of the river system on which they depend, but tensions often erupt. Experts have long warned that water scarcity exacerbated by climate change could lead to more conflict.

Jordan has no choice but to buy large quantities of water in Israel, which has a huge desalination program, in which it removes salt from seawater to make it fit for human consumption. But desalination consumes a lot of energy: it consumes large amounts of energy; an energy that is not yet green and renewable and that only adds to global warming, one of the main drivers of water scarcity.

As the climate continues to warm and water is scarce, part of the solution in the Middle East will have to involve reducing water consumption in agriculture. This can also mean changing the type of food farmers grow and export, Rosenfeld said.

“In Israel, for example, we used to grow a lot of oranges, but at some point we realized that we were exporting water that we don’t have,” he said, adding that the crops could also be designed to be more resilient. to heat and dryness.

And Almazroui, of King Abdulaziz University, said the dams could be better organized to consider changing rain patterns. Coordination in the management of rivers flowing between countries also needs to be improved.

But this will not help a farmer whose family has owned land for generations and cannot necessarily move to wetter climates or has little control over where a neighboring country could build a dam.

Raad al-Tamami, a 54-year-old father who lives in Diyala province in northeastern Baghdad, relies on the Diyal River, a tributary of the Tigris River, to fetch water. Diyal has been drying up for years and has forced Al-Tamami to halve its fruit production on its three farms.

He and his fellow farmers work on a water rationing program and sometimes wait up to a month for the water to arrive.

This reliance on more water to ensure food security could ironically jeopardize food availability: farmers will only keep agriculture in these difficult conditions for so long.

This is what plagues al-Tamami’s mind all the time.

“Many farmers, myself included, are seriously considering leaving this profession, which is inherited from their father, grandfather, and starting to look for more profitable jobs that will guarantee a better future for our children.”