Fridays in Jordan have a magical quality about them, as thousands of Muslims congregate in mosques to pray alongside their neighbors. For many, it is also water day — when enormous government water trucks fill tanks on the roofs of homes and businesses. For the average family, this tank holds approximately 1,000 gallons and will be their only source of water for the next week. In this environment of relative scarcity, water is treated with reverence.
But just 40 miles away, in Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp, that much water is an unimaginable luxury. Row after row of tattered shelters harbor almost 81,000 Syrian refugees in the sweltering heat. Water is so scarce that each person is allotted only nine gallons per day. Multiple families are forced to share one bathtub, avoid washing clothes, and reduce drinking water consumption to ensure they don’t run out before the next day’s rations.
Government officials are banking on an ambitious pipeline connecting the Red Sea and Dead Sea to solve the crisis. Called the Red Sea-Dead Sea Conveyance Project, or RSDSCP, the project remains in flux as diplomatic tensions in the region flare.
Extreme Drought
One million, four hundred thousand refugees have crossed the Jordan border in the past decade, primarily due to the escalating violence in Syria. They now comprise 15 percent of the population, straining infrastructure and government resources across the country. The water sector has been hit particularly hard.
“Syrian refugees have increased water needs by 21 percent throughout the Kingdom and 40 percent in the north,” Iyad Dahiyat, Jordan’s minister of water, told FranceInfo last year.
According to the ministry, each Syrian refugee costs the water sector approximately 440 JD/year. This rapid influx of demand for a resource which was is already in scarce supply means the country is desperate for water.
At the same time, Jordan is confronting its worst drought in decades. Located in one of the driest areas in the world, Jordan receives less than 200 millimeters of rainfall per year. Most of its water originates in the Jordan and Yarmouk Rivers, which are increasingly struggling to supply enough water to meet demand as temperatures rise and rainfall declines.
Conditions are only expected to get worse as carbon emissions accelerate global climate change. Modeling from the Stanford University Jordan Water Project estimates that by the end of the century, rainfall will decrease by 30 percent and Jordan’s average temperatures will increase by 42 degrees Fahrenheit.
A ‘Pipe Dream?’
Since 1665, those who live on the banks of the Dead Sea have dreamed of saving it by connecting it to the Red Sea via a canal. The past 350 years have seen little progress on the project, due primarily to geopolitical tensions preventing cooperation among Jordan, Israel, and Palestine, all of which have a significant stake in the body of water. Especially over the past century, as Israel and the Arab world remained locked in constant conflict over Palestinian statehood, the countries that share the Dead Sea have never been able to cooperate enough to build a canal.
However, in the past three decades, as droughts became more severe and large refugee flows dramatically increased demand for water, Jordan has faced heightened pressure to find a solution. Hussam Hussein, a professor at East Anglia University, told the HPR that Jordan’s desperation for a solution is well-known in the region. “For Jordan, it is a must to proceed with [the canal] in order to secure water in the country,” said Hussein. “At one point, Jordan even considered moving forward by itself.”
However, as Emily McKee, assistant professor of anthropology at Northern Illinois University, explained, since countries in the region share water sources, cooperation on infrastructure is challenging. “There’s a troubled history of cross-border water use between Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and Syria as well,” she told the HPR. “The debate has been really intense since the Ottoman Empire, but has become particularly politically charged with threads of Zionism and Israeli statehood.”
The origins of the modern project stem back to 2002, when Jordan’s King Abdullah approached Israeli President Moshe Katsav about saving the Dead Sea. Abdullah and Katsav agreed to hold a joint dialogue but later formed a trilateral partnership with Palestine at the request of the World Bank.
Surprisingly, the World Bank did not provide funds for the pipeline’s infrastructure, a unique agreement that has occurred only few times in the organization’s 74-year history, according to a bank official. Instead, it conducted a series of studies that ultimately recommended a 110-mile pipeline be built to connect the Gulf of Aqaba on the Red Sea to the Dead Sea, running through Jordanian territory. Alongside the pipeline, the study recommended a desalination plant and two hydropower plants be built. At full capacity, the pipeline would carry up to two billion cubic meters of seawater per year.
Once the studies were complete, two problems became apparent. First, the estimated project cost was $10 billion, far out of reach for any of the countries involved. Second, environmental groups spoke out against the project, expressing concerns about unknown chemical reactions that might occur if too much brine was diverted to the Dead Sea.
These problems ultimately led Israel, Jordan, and Palestine to initially limit the scope of the RSDSCP, allowing them time to navigate the pipeline’s complex logistical and funding challenges. The resulting smaller project, “Phase I,” was announced in 2016 and serves as a pilot, allowing environmental impacts to be studied on a micro-scale before potential large-scale catastrophes occur.
Phase I involves the construction of a desalination plant north of Aqaba, which will process 80-100 million cubic meters of water per year. A pipeline will be constructed to carry salt brine from the Red Sea to the desalination plant. After desalination, salt brine will be piped to the Dead Sea in hopes of saving it from evaporation. The infrastructure project builds on a 2015 water-swap agreement between Jordan, Israel, and Palestine. Israel will be able to purchase 35 million cubic meters of water from Jordan’s desalination plant. In exchange, Jordan will be able to buy 50 million cubic meters of water from Lake Kinneret in Israel annually, which would double its current allocation. This agreement allows both countries to supply water to constituents traditionally isolated from water production facilities.
“It’s not really a Red-Dead Sea canal anymore,” Hussein said. “There’s still a connection through the canal, but overall, it’s more of a water swap agreement between the three governments than the huge canal that was planned in the ’90s.”
Saving a Symbol
Officials are hopeful that the RSDSCP will help alleviate the country’s drought, but also that it will save a symbolically important body of water: the Dead Sea. Formerly part of a large lake which extended all the way to the Sea of Galilee, the Dead Sea is now only a shadow of its former self. 18,000 years ago, its connection to Galilee evaporated, leaving extremely salty brine trapped in the desert basin 1,300 feet below sea level. Freshwater from the surrounding mountains flows into the basin, keeping the Dead Sea alive but quickly evaporating in triple-digit temperatures, leaving behind rich salt and mineral deposits. 50 years ago, this cycle was interrupted as growing populations in the region diverted freshwater for drinking water and irrigation. Now, the sea is rapidly evaporating, receiving only 10 percent of the freshwater necessary to replenish itself.
This is distressing to those in the region for a number of reasons. The sea is significant in both Islamic and Christian scripture, believed to be the home of the ancient people of Sodom, whom God punished for their wickedness. Some Muslims also believe Moses is buried in a mosque near the sea. And, of course, the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947, are a treasure trove for scholars, containing 2,000-year-old scripture written in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. If the sea evaporates, a major symbol for multiple world religions will be lost.
The site is also important ecologically and for the robust tourism industry it supports. Last year, 3.6 million visitors came from around the world to visit the famous body of water and soak up what many believe to be its curative minerals.
No Shortage of Challenges
Though geopolitical tensions have since thawed enough for the project to get a green light from all three countries, fundraising for the project remains imperative for its success.
“The symbolic importance of saving the Dead Sea is important for the two countries from a funding perspective,” Hussein told the HPR. “It’s very easy to use that symbolic importance to attract funding from all over the world.”
Much of the funding is expected to come from the private sector, but the United States pledged $100 million to the project in 2015, and other countries and agencies have raised a combined $400 million.
Aside from the enormous logistical challenges involved in constructing a pipeline 110 miles long, bitter rivalries in the region threaten to destabilize the project. In July 2017, two Jordanians were killed in Amman by an Israeli embassy guard, heightening tensions between the two countries and halting the project. Just as the parties reached a resolution that allowed the project to move forward, Trump burst onto the scene, upsetting the already-fragile sense of order.
“The role of Trump in the region has been quite detrimental, and tragic, especially when he decided to move the embassy to Jerusalem,” Hussein said. “The decision came when the relations between Jordan and Israel were already at their lowest due to the attacks.”
While Trump’s actions in Jerusalem threaten the pipeline, he has otherwise aligned himself with past administrations by supporting the project.“Trump is in line with the U.S. policies that were in place under previous administrations, pushing for the project financially and politically,” Hussein said.
Pressure from environmentalists and other advocates is also building, tarnishing the brand of the project. Ecopeace Middle East launched several information campaigns against the project in the past few years, calling for government policies that restore water tributaries to their natural state, reducing the need for potentially invasive infrastructure.“There are those that say, rather than building giant infrastructure projects … we should pursue returning flow to the Jordan River, allowing it to be a viable ecosystem and waterway,” McKee said. There seems to be little appetite for such projects, however — Jordan is narrowly focused on infrastructure development, forging ahead with the RSDSCP instead.
The Path Ahead
This project is just one of many in the works in Jordan and the rest of the region, as shrinking water supplies and rising populations force governments to seek innovative solutions. Many drought-affected countries lack sufficient financial resources to independently develop massive infrastructure projects, and look to international funding sources for assistance.
McKee urged the global community to remember that their consumption decisions have a direct impact on the plight faced by Middle Eastern countries. “This is not simply the far-away problem of a very dry area … we need to think about the interconnections involved; for example, a great proportion of Jordan agriculture is export-oriented. Water scarcity problems around the world are a shared problem and a shared responsibility,” she said.
In Christian scripture, the prophet Ezekiel has a vision that the Dead Sea will someday live again. When the coming Messiah rules the earth, he prophesied that water will flow from Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, bringing life back to the sea.
It remains to be seen whether the Dead Sea will last long enough for his prophecy to have a chance at fruition.