With two dedicated sessions and a number of mentions throughout other presentations, the Nile Basin took the center stage during the conference, with a strong focus on the representations and framing of the Nile and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) in the media and political rhetoric.

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.

The ultimate goal of the programme is to create a generation of young professionals who are dedicated to solving the current water problems by applying communication, collaboration and co-creation approaches that cut across political, practical and scientific domains.

The Euphrates-Tigris basin is among the most important river basins in Turkey and in the Middle East. The average annual discharge of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers is 84 billion m3, which equals to the average annual flow of the Nile River. Euphrates provides 90 per cent of water, whose average annual flow is 32 billion m3, from Turkey.

The discussions about the creation of a ministry related to the water resources have continued for a long time and took its final form in 2011 under the name of the Ministry of Forestry and Water Affairs.This ministry is responsible for the development of policies related to the protection of water resources and their sustainable use, and the coordination of the national water management.

further reading to Lebanon country file

The shared nature of Israel’s water resources poses a particular challenge. In order for water use to become sustainable in the region, transboundary water management must be improved.

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

In many ways, past policies and practices have exacerbated the problems of access, abstraction and overuse of this essential natural resource. After decades of relying mainly on supply-side solutions, Jordan has expanded its approaches to addressing these problems.