Transboundary water management in the Jordan River basin and the Blue Nile basin has historically been difficult. While water diplomacy surrounding the Jordan River is obstructed by decades of geopolitical conflicts between the riparians and unilateral infrastructure projects, cooperation over the Blue Nile has been hampered by conflicting views on water ownership and resource utilization for most of the 20th and 21st century.

Lebanon has announced the construction of the dam via the United Nations as per the UN Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses (to which Israel is not a signatory), which stipulates that signatories must give “prior notification of planned measures”. The plan is currently pending.

Israel has developed innovative solutions to address its water challenges. The most significant of these are desalination and wastewater reuse . . .

Shifting regional relationships have affected Jordan’s access to these shared resources throughout the country’s history. In several cases, Jordan has received less than its equitable share of the resource, as upstream neighbours overexploit rivers and groundwater sources through damming, diversions and pumping.

After the peace treaty in 1994, the implementation of a canal linking the Red Sea and the Dead Sea became the focal point of Israeli-Jordanian cooperation. In February 2015, Jordan and Israel signed an agreement to implement the first phase of the project at a cost of $900 million over a period of three years.

Given the issues discussed above regarding the amount, reliability and quality of surface water sources, the Jordanian population relies mainly on groundwater for its domestic water supply.

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 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.

The catchment of the Dead Sea covers approximately 42,000km2, stretching from southern Lebanon to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt (see map below, the area bordered in white). All rainfall in this area that is not evaporated or extracted for use elsewhere accumulates in the Dead Sea, a low-lying saline lake. Because the catchment of the […]