Part of the river’s watershed extends eastward into the West Bank. The river’s water level and quality have been deteriorating since 1955 . . .

With much of its land an arid, inhospitable desert, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, one of the world’s driest countries, threatens to die of thirst. Analysts have long warned that Jordan, saddled with shrinking renewable resources and a quickly growing population, faced a reckoning. In recent years, however, the challenges confronting this parched kingdom have accelerated.

The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, with an estimated 4,500 inhabitants per square kilometre. The population has increased more than 20 times since 1948

Fanack Water speaks to Tawfiq Habashneh, Secretary General of the Water Authority of Jordan, about supplying water to a growing population.

If the water issue is not urgently addressed, the outlook for the future is catastrophic. Gaza’s growing population needs water and the aquifer can no longer meet demand. It will take decades to reverse the damage to the aquifer, but we must to everything we can to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza.

Gaza’s water crisis has been steadily worsening over recent decades. The area’s only source of fresh water is the Coastal Aquifer, a groundwater basin that runs the length of the Gaza Strip and along part of the Israeli coast.

Jordan’s water resources

The cost of the falling level of the Dead Sea has been estimated at $73-227 million/yr. The cost of producing potable water at Aqaba and transferring it to Amman is estimated at $2/m3, considerably higher than the cost of water produced through the RSDS Project (<$1.5/m3).

The most worrying potential impacts of the project on the Dead Sea are: The original project aims to mitigate environmental degradation of the Dead Sea, which includes: The social assessment shows that most of the negative impacts will occur during the construction period and arise mainly from the influx of foreign workers into a sparsely […]

The Dead Sea is part of the Jordan Rift Valley (JRV), which extends from Lake Tiberias in the north to the Gulf of Aqaba in the south. The bottom of the Dead Sea is, at 790 metres below sea level (m bsl), the lowest point in this valley and the shoreline, at about 420m bsl, is the lowest land surface on earth.