鈥淎 SEA of opportunity.鈥� The giant blue advertising hoarding at the edge of the road that descends from the bustle of Amman to the calm of the Dead Sea says it all. Amid the daily turmoil of the Middle East, something remarkable happened this July. After three years of negotiation, the governments of Israel and Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority agreed the first steps of a plan to refill the Dead Sea with water from the Red Sea by carving out a 200-kilometre canal through the south of Jordan.
The potential benefits of this highly ambitious scheme are manifold: the plan is to use the 400-metre height difference between the two seas to generate hydropower, and build the world鈥檚 largest desalination plant to supply communities around the Dead Sea with drinking water. The scheme would also help restore the area鈥檚 biological diversity, which is being slowly choked as water levels drop.
The Dead Sea, the lowest point on the Earth鈥檚 surface, is surrounded by Israel, Jordan and the West Bank. It has been receding by roughly 1 metre a year for the past three decades. Some estimate that it has half the quantity of water it did a century ago. A major reason for this is that more than 90 per cent of the water from the Jordan river, the Dead Sea鈥檚 main source, is being diverted to supply farms, households and industry. Another reason is that industry is extracting water from the Dead Sea for its mineral content. Rainfall can鈥檛 begin to compensate for the water being lost.
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The canal is one of several engineering mega-projects that have been proposed to stop the Dead Sea drying up 鈥� others include a tunnel linking it to the Mediterranean. Now that it seems the diggers will finally move in, the project is causing more than a few frayed nerves. For a start, it will cost at least $4 billion to build, a figure that is expected to rise once construction gets under way. And there are still some important unanswered questions, which a $15.5 million, two-year feasibility study, organised by the World Bank, will try to address before the project gets the final green light.
These questions include: how will the chemistry of the Dead Sea and its surrounding ecosystem be affected by introducing water from a different source? How much will Israelis, Jordanians and Palestinians have to pay for water and electricity and will they be able to afford it? How will the disruption caused by the building of the canal, pipelines, pumping stations and other infrastructure affect local communities? And what will happen once the Dead Sea is refilled after 10 years or so: will that mean an end to the supply of electricity?
But critics claim that the feasibility study ignores the two most important questions of all: is such a project really needed, and are there any alternatives? Leading the opposition is Gidon Bromberg of Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME), a coalition of Arab and Israeli environmentalists. He argues that the World Bank study would be more thorough if it took a different approach and asked why the Dead Sea was drying up, and how the health of the Jordan river could be restored. He sees little merit in connecting the Red Sea to the Dead Sea when there are cheaper, more sustainable ways of increasing the water supply. Over the past few years he has taken the unusual step of lobbying lawmakers in the US to put gentle pressure on the three countries to consider alternatives to the scheme. His assumption is that Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority are more likely to respond to pressure from the US than from anyone else.
鈥淚f the Dead Sea is left as it is, a point may come when its name becomes obsolete鈥�
Bromberg鈥檚 case is likely to be helped by a recent analysis from US think tank the Rand Corporation on the water needs of the Palestinians. This suggests that rather than desalinating water from the Red Sea, the West Bank and Gaza would be best served by more common-sense and less expensive measures such as using water more efficiently and recycling waste water for use in agriculture. The other large-scale idea that has been around for a while, diverting water from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea through a tunnel, would mean the water travelling a much shorter distance. The snag is that the tunnel would have to pass through Israel, something that Jordan and the Palestinian Authority have always opposed.
If the project fails to take off, and nothing is agreed to replace it, it will be an opportunity missed. If the Dead Sea is left as it is, a point may come when its name becomes obsolete. Some scientists reckon that as the waters continue to recede, the concentration of salts will become so high that evaporation will stop. If that happens, Bromberg points out, you won鈥檛 have to be Jesus to walk across the Dead Sea.
