IT HAS been a hot, dry summer in the Middle East, and as water levels have plunged, political tensions have risen. In early July, Israel’s Water Authority unveiled plans to combat what it called “the worst water crisis in the nation’s history”. Environmental campaigners responded by slating the Water Authority for not doing enough to protect the region’s aquifers. Meanwhile, Palestinian authorities warned of dire consequences if Israel didn’t provide them with more water.
At the end of July, across the border in Jordan, work began on a $1 billion project to extract 100 million cubic metres of water a year from the Disi aquifer, 320 kilometres south of the capital, Amman. Yet while Jordan is certainly parched and its population is soaring, partly through an influx of Iraqi refugees, critics warn that exploiting the aquifer in this way is unsustainable.
In the same week, hundreds of protesters packed a convention centre in Herzliya, Israel, just north of Tel Aviv, to harangue the World Bank about the largest and probably the most controversial water distribution project in the Middle East – , which aims to replenish the shrinking Dead Sea and supply the region with fresh water. The RDC will mean building a 180-kilometre pipeline, pumping stations and a hydroelectric power plant, as well as a desalination plant to rival the world’s largest, the Ashkelon installation on Israel’s Mediterranean coast. Yet protesters argue that investing billions in an environmentally damaging infrastructure is senseless when simply restoring the region’s natural systems would bring greater benefit.
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It’s a classic tension: build your way out of trouble with an exciting mega-project, or try to fix all the fiddly little problems that caused the mess in the first place. So far, the mega-project is winning. But if the clash at Herzliya is anything to go by, the battle over the region’s most ambitious water supply scheme is only just beginning.
The RDC is not a new idea; something like it was first mooted in the mid-1800s and the concept has been knocking about ever since. The current plan – agreed in principle by Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian authorities – will take 1.9 billion cubic metres of seawater from the Red Sea each year and lift it 120 metres over the highest point of the Arava valley that runs north from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea and separates Israel and Jordan. Gravity will then carry it through 180 kilometres of pipes to hydroelectric and desalination plants close to the Dead Sea, which at 418 metres below sea level is the lowest dry place on the Earth’s surface (see diagram). This water would not only provide hydroelectricity and potable water to Jordan, one of the 10 water-poorest countries in the world, but just as importantly would restore the level of the Dead Sea.
Disappearing act
The Dead Sea’s disappearing act is particularly obvious at the sleepy spa resort of Ein Gedi, where tourists now ride a tractor-hauled vehicle for the trip to the shore. Local kibbutz resident and campaigner Gundi Shachal says that when the resort opened in the early 1990s, the water reached the edge of the complex. Now it is hundreds of metres away, she says, and receding fast. Each day the journey gets a few centimetres longer, and every year Ein Gedi has to find thousands of shekels to extend the road.
Reasons for this change are well understood. Extraction of water from the Jordan, the only water course that feeds the sea, has reduced this holy river to a heavily polluted trickle. Because of this, the Dead Sea has an annual deficit of some 850 million cubic metres and its level is now falling by a metre each year. It has shrunk from 75 to 50 kilometres long in the last century and lost a third of its surface area in two decades.
As the waters recede, along the shoreline, thanks to a layer of salt about 25 metres underground. While the briny Dead Sea – nine times as salty as the Mediterranean – covered this layer, it stayed put. Now the sea level has dropped, and fresh water has begun to erode the subterranean salt, destabilising the soil above.
With the ground disappearing beneath its feet, the kibbutz at Ein Gedi has been forced to close its date plantations. A campsite close to the shoreline was abandoned when holes appeared where people had pitched their tents, and it now looks like a lunar landscape. Equally, on the opposite, Jordanian, shore, sinkholes spell disaster for subsistence farmers squatting on the recently exposed seabed. If a sinkhole appears under their crops, they have little alternative but to leave the area and search for new land to farm.
The Dead Sea won’t disappear altogether, though. For a start, it is 320 metres deep, and, as it contracts, its diminishing surface area and increasing salinity will protect it from too much further evaporation. However, after decades of political indifference, the sea’s parlous state has suddenly become a flashpoint for concerns about water exploitation in the Middle East. Everyone agrees something must be done, but the solutions proposed are radically different.
In 2005, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority signed an agreement to study the RDC idea, supported by the World Bank. This spring finally got under way, funded largely by the French government. Paris-based engineering firm Coyne et Bellier won the contract to carry out the engineering appraisal, while the environmental impact assessment is being led by British consultants ERM.
Environmental groups are concerned that sucking huge quantities of water from the Red Sea, home to fragile coral reefs, and then transporting it across the vulnerable desert ecosystem of the Arava valley to deposit it in the Dead Sea could have a devastating effect. by Ittai Gavrieli at the Geological Survey of Israel (GSI) in Jerusalem and his team also suggests that adding the far less saline water from the Red Sea to that of the Dead Sea will do more harm than good.
According to Gavrieli’s team, the less dense Red Sea water will initially sit as a layer on top of the Dead Sea water. Then the sea’s chemistry will change as the calcium-rich Dead Sea brine and the sulphate-rich seawater react to form an insoluble precipitate of calcium sulphate, or gypsum, turning the Dead Sea white.
After that . Experiments in ponds in the vicinity of the Dead Sea produced a brownish-green microbial blooming when the Dead Sea brine was diluted with seawater by anything more than 10 per cent. What’s more, as the surface water becomes less dense, tourists expecting to bob around reading a newspaper could instead find their copy of The Jerusalem Post getting wet. For a community like Ein Gedi that has invested millions of dollars in tourism, it would be a catastrophe.
It is harder to predict what will happen in the long term, Gavrieli says. Before 1979, the Dead Sea was meromictic, meaning it was permanently stratified into layers that didn’t mix. Following the severe reduction of fresh water flowing into its upper reaches it became holomictic – essentially mixing to the same composition throughout its depth. Pumping less dense seawater onto the surface would change things once again.
Nothing like this addition of water has been attempted before, so Gavrieli’s team has developed a computer model of the Dead Sea to try to predict more accurately how layers of different volumes, temperatures and mineral compositions might mix over time. Preliminary results published in 2006 suggest the density of the surface layer will decrease, creating an anaerobic lower layer that could start producing hydrogen sulphide, as it has done in the past. So you can add an eggy smell to your algae and soggy newsprint.
A team at . It concluded that the RDC pipeline would be vulnerable to the region’s complex seismic activity, and any spillage of salt water could have a devastating effect, particularly on the valley’s shallower aquifers. These are critical for the existing desert ecosystem, not to mention local agriculture and the lucrative tourism industry.
Sucking water out of the narrow northern tip of the Red Sea at up to 60 cubic metres a second could also harm the region’s stunning coral reefs and 800 species of fish, which attract large numbers of tourists. The ecosystem is already under threat from booming port and tourist development in Aqaba and Eilat, so designing and dredging the RDC intake channel with the utmost care will be critical to avoid further damage.
“Sucking water out of the Red Sea could harm its stunning coral reefs and the fish that live there”
But this impact would pale in comparison with what Israel’s president Shimon Peres has in mind. Not only does he want to build the RDC, he also envisages a Las Vegas-style real-estate boom prompted by tourism and high-tech agriculture, creating “a million jobs”. Backed by billionaire property developer Yitzhak Tshuva, the vision includes a staggering 200,000 hotel rooms, several artificial lakes, three industrial zones and even an Africa-style safari park. “It’s all right for Peres,” says Shachal. “He won’t live to see the results.”
Even if Peres’s dream is regarded as too grandiose, foreign governments are excited by the prospect of Israel and its neighbours cooperating on such a critical issue. In November 2007, the US Senate passed a resolution praising the “unusual and welcome spirit of cooperation” being shown by the three interested governments in addressing the region’s water shortage. The World Bank argues that restoring the Dead Sea and desalinating Red Sea water for the region will bring a peace dividend.
That result would be more than welcome on the West Bank. Jewish settlers there each consume between 200 and 300 litres of water a day, four to five times the average for Palestinians, according to the human rights group B’Tselem, based in Jerusalem. The West Bank barrier being erected by Israel is also dividing Palestinians from many of their aquifers, making them more reliant on Israel for water.
But if political momentum to construct the conduit is growing, the Middle East’s fledgling environmental movement is fighting a spirited action against what it regards as a disaster in the making. It has harried the World Bank for breaching its own rules on involving local communities in this kind of huge infrastructure project, and threatens more protests if the bank fails to meet its own standards.
“We forced the bank to hold a public hearing,” says Gidon Bromberg of Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME) in his office in Tel Aviv. “The failure of the World Bank to look at alternatives entrenches unsustainable water resource management and is criminal.”
FoEME says that the Jordanians and Israelis have very different agendas behind their support for the Red-Dead Conduit. For Jordan’s King Abdullah, it says, the RDC is a legacy project, a latter-day Aswan dam that marks a milestone in his kingdom’s development. It will also be a bonanza for Jordan’s biggest construction and engineering firms. There are rumours that land along the preferred route has already been snapped up by speculators.
Israel isn’t so interested in the water, Bromberg argues. It is already getting 12 per cent of its needs from the desalination plant at Ashkelon at just 57 cents per 1000 litres. Water from this project could be twice as expensive. And although hydroelectric power could be harnessed for desalination, it will take extra energy to pump the fresh water uphill to Amman. “Forget the environment,” says Bromberg. “Where’s the economics in this?”
Bromberg concedes that will be weighed up as part of the feasibility study, which is expected to last two years, but his main complaint is that this vast project misses the point completely. “Since time immemorial it was the Jordan river that replenished the Dead Sea. In just 50 years we have managed to turn the holy Jordan into a sewage canal and dry up a third of the Dead Sea.” He says you could well come out in a rash if you immersed yourself at the spot where the Bible suggests Jesus was baptised.
Bromberg also believes that by limiting itself to this one project, the World Bank has turned its back on a genuinely sustainable solution to the Dead Sea’s problems. In Israel, he says, agriculture consumes 50 per cent of water resources yet contributes 1 to 2 per cent of GDP. Similarly in Jordan, agriculture uses 70 per cent of water and makes up 5 per cent of GDP. “We live in the desert, yet we grow tropical fruits for export. It makes no economic sense, as water in this most water-scarce part of the world is heavily subsidised for farming.”
Instead of building an expensive artificial waterway that is vulnerable to earthquakes and military attack, critics say it would be in the region’s interests to cooperate to fix the water supply it has already got. FoEME acknowledges that Jordan is parched, but points out that the pipes that would carry the desalinated RDC water are leaky. Jordan already loses more than 130 million cubic metres this way every year – more than the huge Disi project will provide.
Wouldn’t it be better, Bromberg argues, to spend those billions of dollars managing existing water resources more effectively and save the Jordan valley in the process? “Rehabilitate the Jordan river,” he says. “Facilitate livelihood alternatives for the 400,000 residents of the valley and you’ll see real benefits and a real peace dividend, not a white elephant that will make a very small class of people very wealthy.”
Allies in the environmental movement agree that restoring the Jordan is the right thing to do, but would be difficult in practice. Clive Lipchin, director of research at Israel’s Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, wonders where the water could come from. The only way he sees of restoring the Jordan is by adding desalinated water – perhaps pumped from Haifa. “Another option,” says Lipchin, “may be to restore the Jordan with treated wastewater.” Unfortunately, most treated wastewater is already used for irrigation, but he says legislation and public pressure could change that and help restore the Jordan and the Dead Sea without recourse to the RDC.
Shachal agrees that the region’s leaders are missing the point. “No one is asking what’s best for the environment. Why destroy the Arava desert when you could restore the Jordan valley and bring tourists there instead? Millions and millions of people want to come to that river to be baptised. The Jordan is one of the most important migration routes for birds. Why not develop that?”
