What new millennium? True, the third millennium of the Christian calendar, adopted as the civil calendar in most countries, has begun.1 And we are perhaps well into the eleventh millennium since the “agricultural revolution,” when humankind began to change the landscape. About 15,000 years have gone by since the melting of the ice—in fact, not all, but only two-thirds of the ice. The Industrial Revolution began much less than 1,000 years ago, the sanitation and hygiene revolution only about a century ago. Among the most dramatic transformations of the last half century, the population “explosion” cannot but leave its mark on the future. From 1.6 billion in 1900, the world’s population went to nearly 6 billion people in 2000. Growth was faster than exponential: about 0.7 percent per year from 1750 to 1950, but 1.9 percent per year between 1950 and 1975, adding billions of babies to the world’s population. For the extra children to have any chance of survival, of reaching the age of one year, food production had to be increased by at least as much, and producing the extra food required withdrawing much more water from the ground and rivers.
What about the future? Will the 21st century see stabilization of world population?2 Signs of this have already appeared: population growth has slowed since 1975, and for the first time in human history this resulted not from an increase in mortality, as when plague raged in the fourteenth century, but from reduction of the birthrate. In France, for reasons that still are not fully explained, this “demographic transition” had already begun 200 years ago; it spread to practically all European countries in the last decades of the twentieth century. The recent fall of the birthrate has accompanied and may be related to the increase in the standard of living and the achievement of some degree of women’s rights and equality. Can stabilization and reduction of the birthrate be attained without this, and without authoritarian measures of the sort imposed in China? What about Third World nations? Continuation of the high 3 percent per year birthrate still observed in some countries is inconceivable. At that rate, population doubles in twenty-three years, with the number of children needing schooling increasing still faster. Under such conditions, who will teach them and give them the intellectual tools needed to survive in the 21st century, rather than indoctrination in suicidal fanaticism?
At the end of the last ice age, between 15,000 and 12,000 years ago, world population may have reached three million. Further increase only became possible with the development of farming, an act of appropriation of vegetation and of water on the land at the expense of other animal species. By the year 1 A.D., some 130 to 330 million human beings lived on the planet, and many of them could not have survived without irrigation. And since that time, humans have managed to nourish several billion people by increasing agricultural productivity and the area of land farmed. Will water availability be the final limit on further growth?
Let’s take stock. First of all, the total amount of water on our planet stays pretty much constant; we can forget about loss to space, or gains from water-bearing comets. As for division of the Earth’s enormous water stock between saltwater, ice, ground and surface freshwater, and water in the atmosphere (see table 6.1), the different shares vary fairly regularly with the seasons and they can also fluctuate from one year to another, but very little. Over thousands of years, however, much larger changes affect the division of water between ice and liquid. In any event, freshwater, essential for land vegetation, only exists as a temporary stage of the water cycle, between the sea and the sea, spending more or less time in that stage depending mostly on whether or not the “meteoric” water infiltrates underground (figs. 6.1 and 10.1). Apart from seafood, all our nourishment depends on freshwater falling from the skies onto the land. Three-fourths of the water used for farming returns directly to the atmosphere by evapotranspiration. Because of this, even though water is a renewable resource on the global scale, it hardly can be counted as renewable liquid water locally. By comparison, a factory usually returns (too often, unfortunately, in a polluted state) more than 90 percent of the water it withdraws from a river; indeed, many can operate with a practically closed water cycle and withdraw very little. Home water “consumption” also returns liquid wastewater. In rich advanced countries, efforts are made to treat wastewater and to return it clean to the rivers or the sea. But in many parts of the world, the waste-water, polluted by human and other wastes, reenters the surface or subsurface water without any treatment. Still, some of that pollution may act to fertilize the land. Wastewater carries with it health risks, but it can also be used as a resource for agriculture and aquaculture, depending on how it is managed; and sometimes it acts as both risk and resource.
How much water is needed, not just to quench thirst, but to feed and clothe a person? To produce the wheat for a kilogram (2.2 lbs.) of bread, a ton of water. For someone living on bread alone, with nutritious value of 2,000 Calories per day,3 that corresponds to at least 200 cubic meters of water per year, assuming no losses between farmer and consumer. A more realistic figure is 400, thus more than 1,000 liters (a cubic meter or a ton) of water per day. Replacing bread by beef or mutton only one day out of ten more than doubles the effective water consumption. Figures given as the minimum for survival of an individual range from 500 to 1,000 cubic meters of water per year (i.e., 1,300 to 2,700 liters per day). In 1990, 125 million human beings had access to less than 1,000 cubic meters per year. In the wealthy countries of America and Europe, people currently use directly or indirectly close to 2,000 cubic meters per year, in some cases even much more.
How does rainfall satisfy these needs? In well-watered regions—for example, much of France and the eastern United States—most agricultural production does not need irrigation. In other areas, where farmers would like in times of drought to be able to tap stored water surpluses, irrigation doesn’t exist. Much of the rainwater that falls on the fields or the woods returns to the atmosphere by evapotranspiration. Still, over much of the world, the largest share of the water used to satisfy human needs—for irrigated farming over 16 percent of the world’s land surface, for home consumption, for cooling of power plants, for industry, etc.—comes from withdrawal of runoff or groundwater. We can estimate the renewable water resource in two different ways: by considering total rainfall over land, 110 trillion cubic meters per year; alternatively, considering only runoff, more than 40 trillion cubic meters per year (see table 12.1 and fig. 6.1).
Today, by way of agriculture, livestock, and forestry, humans appropriate more than a fourth of the world biosphere’s “net primary production,” the production of living plant matter by photosynthesis.4 Out of the 70 trillion cubic meters of precipitation that fall on the land but return to the atmosphere by evapotranspiration, about 28 trillion pass by way of land exploited by humans. Whether we measure our activities on Earth by the areas that we occupy and manage more or less well, by the plant matter that we consume (directly, or by way of eating meat), or by the rainwater that we use mainly by the intermediary of plants, our impacts on Mother Nature are far from small, even on the scale of the planet as a whole. As deforestation advances in the Tropics, how will this expansion of human action affect the division of the waters? We don’t know. Where pasture, food crops, or tree farming take the place of the tropical forest (assuming they don’t quickly become barren wasteland), will runoff increase at the expense of evapotranspiration, or vice versa?
TABLE 12.1 RUNOFF:
RENEWABLE FRESHWATER FLUXES AND WATER AVAILABLE PER PERSON
Annual runoff figures for the world and for each region are given in column 2 in cubic kilometers per year, i.e., billions of cubic meters per year. Per capita runoff figures (columns 4 and 5) are in cubic meters per year per person.
Because rainfall over some areas (in particular the interior of the Amazon River basin) consists mostly of regionally recycled water from evapotranspiration by forest vegetation, the question has been raised whether deforestation will not lead to the drying up of those areas. On average over the globe, as noted earlier (fig. 6.1), nearly two-thirds of the rain that falls on land returns to the atmosphere as evapotranspiration rather than running off to the sea in streams and rivers. In some areas, in particular on sloping terrain, deforestation reinforces runoff at the expense of evapotranspiration, aggravating soil erosion at the same time. However, the reverse may hold in other areas, i.e., runoff may be reduced and evapotranspiration enhanced. That depends on the vegetation replacing the forest trees, the properties of the soil, and the skill with which the land is managed. In any case, extension of agriculture and ranching to previously wild areas inevitably encroaches on the living space of many wild species, considered by ranchers and farmer as useless if not as pests to be exterminated. Such expansion of the human-controlled domain thus reduces what is called biodiversity, the enormous variety of life forms on the planet. Moreover, as on many occasions in the past, such expansion diminishes the chances of cultural or even of physical survival of those peoples that still practice hunting and gathering on lands that no one coveted before. Considerable difficulties stand in the way of attempts to protect the tropical forest (in the Amazon, in Africa, in Indonesia), even when the arguments given in favor of such protection are couched in terms of protection of economic interests of modern society. Deforestation does not constitute a threat to the oxygen in the atmosphere, despite the myth or metaphor that calls the Amazon forest the “lungs of the Earth.” Maybe deforestation leads to climate and hydrological catastrophes, but maybe not. What then? Should all attempts to protect the Amazon forest and its native inhabitants then be abandoned? It seems to me that there is a sort of inverse hypocrisy when environmentalists attempt to justify moral reactions and basic decency by purely egotistical arguments of economics.5
Table 12.1 includes a column for “accessible” freshwater. The freshwater flow not exploited and considered inaccessible includes practically all the upper Amazon basin’s flow (more than 5,000 cubic km per year), Eurasian and Canadian rivers flowing to the Arctic Ocean, and about half of the Congo River’s flow (fig. 10.3). At present, very few people live in these regions through which flows a significant fraction of the world’s renewable freshwater. Asia has enormous freshwater resources but, except in Siberia, intensive farming has long exploited them to feed an ever-increasing population more and more efficiently, as time has passed. In Europe, such development and population increase took place more recently, over an area and with water resources half as large. In both cases, the per capita accessible water resource amounts to about 4,000 cubic meters per year, enough to support the present large populations (Asia: 61% of the world’s population; Europe: 13%), considering the development of agricultural productivity. In Africa, the per capita water resource considered accessible today is only slightly larger. In the “new” worlds of the Americas and Oceania, farmer and rancher colonists from Europe displaced, infected, and often massacred the indigenous populations, sometimes replacing them with slaves from Africa. Because population densities have remained low compared with Old World norms, present New World inhabitants enjoy at least twice as large per capita available freshwater. About 40 percent of the world’s runoff is found in the Americas for only 14 percent of the world’s population. In Australia, although water is scarce, humans are even scarcer, so that the per capita water resource is ample. And so long as the waters of the jungle and central highlands of New Guinea are considered “inaccessible,” their inhabitants will be left alone!
With accessible water resources of at least 3,500 cubic meters per person per year in different regions of the world, compared with an absolute vital minimum of 500 cubic meters per person per year, and 2,000 corresponding to relative comfort, the margin between needs and resources may appear quite safe, especially considering evaporated and transpired rainwater in addition to runoff. However, nothing in nature guarantees that the water resource, specifically the renewable freshwater flux, automatically keeps up with human population growth. If population doubles one more time, in Europe, Asia, or Africa, the per capita water resource may well fall below the 2,000 level. Of course, in Asia or in Africa, plenty of people would be happy to be sure of even 1,000 cubic meters per year, but in rich countries of Europe, as in North America, the 2,000 level is considered just comfortable. At present, 30 percent of runoff in Europe is already being exploited; the average for the globe is 20 percent. Despite the apparent wildness of vast areas of the world, humankind plays a major role in the water cycle, withdrawing, evaporating, consuming, soiling, and filtering water, from its flow over the land and through vegetation. However, despite worldwide trade in bottled mineral waters, despite projects to ship freshwater from the Great Lakes to the Persian Gulf or from Turkey to Israel, such large-scale freshwater imports remain a privilege of the rich who can exchange oil or high-tech products for water. During coming decades, will human ingenuity find ways to increase the water resource, not only by tapping presently “inaccessible” water but also by accelerating the water cycle? Such increase is not inconceivable, but such projects will require still greater interference in the processes of nature, still more marked humanization (or industrialization) of the environment. Instead of increasing supply, can one limit demand by limiting population and by enhancing the efficiency of water use to satisfy human needs? There again, enhancing efficiency may involve changing the landscape, replacing forests by farms, putting land “to use.” That may also mean building more dams and reservoirs to irrigate dry lands.
Distribution of water resources is uneven between continents, extremely uneven between different countries and regions (table 12.2). Africa includes the moist tropical zone (for example, Gabon, with more than 100,000 cubic meters per person per year), the almost perfectly dry Sahara Desert (where very few people live, but caravans pass), and North Africa (e.g., Algeria, less than 1,000 cubic meters per person per year). The United States enjoys nearly 10,000 cubic meters per person per year, but the figure is much lower for Arizona, much higher for Alaska! In Europe, Spain’s per capita resource (3,000) is only one-seventh that of Sweden (21,000); but, surprisingly, water available per person is still scarcer in Belgium, Poland, and the Ukraine, although those countries are wetter than Spain.
How much of the available water resource is actually used? In Europe, runoff exploitation ranges from 5 percent (Hungary) to 50 percent (Bulgaria, the Ukraine), with most other countries in between, but it has already reached 70 percent in Belgium. Some areas have far more freshwater than their human inhabitants need (Alaska, Gabon, French Guiana, Iceland, Norway, and others), with a minuscule exploitation rate. But in other areas, exploitation exceeds 100 percent—in the Arabian peninsula, Israel, Libya, some areas of the southwestern United States, and some enclaves such as Djibouti. Saudi Arabia consumes freshwater at ten times the rate of renewal. How is an exploitation rate greater than 100 percent possible, and what does it mean? Some rich cities at the edge of the desert along the Persian Gulf get their drinking water by desalination of seawater, perfectly feasible but expensive at about a dollar per cubic meter. However, many places with exploitation rates above 100 percent are in fact tapping a nonrenewable resource, just as in mining: pumping groundwater at a rate far in excess of the rate of renewal of the water table by infiltration. Often, this “fossil” water corresponds to a bygone climate that reigned and rained thousands of years ago. Such resources are used to water crops in the desert, in the Sahara, Saudi Arabia, Australia, and Arizona. On the relatively dry plain of Nebraska and eastern Colorado, pumping of the Ogallala aquifer will probably dry it up completely within a couple of decades.
TABLE 12.2 RUNOFF BY REGION:
AVAILABLE FRESHWATER PER PERSON AND EXPLOITATION RATE
WATER MANAGEMENT: COOPERATION OR CONFLICT?
Although population growth is slowing down, it won’t stop short, and it raises acute problems for water management. First of all, especially in those countries where population continues to rise, increasing food production necessarily requires additional water and fertilizer, and even if enough water exists, indiscriminate use of fertilizer and pesticides may pollute it. Second, since much of the population increase takes place in rapidly growing monster cities, how can enough safe drinking water be supplied to them, and how can the growing flux of waste be cleaned up? Even today, millions of people in the poor countries have no access to safe drinking water, and sewage flows in what passes for the street in thousands of shantytowns.
It’s often said that water is part of a common human heritage, but in what sense can this be true? Water problems must first be solved at the local level. Rainfall on a field appears first of all as a gift from heaven, from God if you will, but His ways are not so simple, as we shall see.6 As for water drawn from the village well, used by villagers to drink, to give drink to their animals, to cook, and to wash, that water is first of all part of the village heritage, and it’s up to the villagers to dig the wells, to maintain them, and to protect them from pollution. The farmer who digs a well or who uses water from a spring on his own property (in many lands having his wife carry it) may consider that it’s his own water. However, when users realize that their well or spring depends on a water table also tapped by other users of other wells and springs located in the next township, and that one or the other or all of the wells may dry up, depending on who uses how much water, they no longer can settle their water problems on a purely local level. That is even more true for use of river water, where upstream withdrawal and waste discharge by one user affect all downstream users. Water management is perhaps best organized at the scale of the basin, where different users and stakeholders in competition—farmers, ranchers, miners, factory operators, cities, power plants, tourists—have somehow to reconcile their competing and at times contradictory interests. Some of them would like to get rid of their wastes at the lowest cost possible, others insist on their rights to “pure” water. Different societies have developed different methods for dealing with these problems, through bodies of law and tradition, through different institutions. Does a mining operation have the right to use and pollute all the water of a stream running through its mountain land, when in the plains, downstream, ranchers need the water for cattle, towns for their citizens? Different states give different answers, and often no solution can be found in local jurisdictions.7 The word rival comes from the Latin rivalis, a person using the same stream as another.
Even in the United States, with over 200 years of democratically elected federal government, centralized authority is often viewed with suspicion although federal funds are always welcome. The same holds in the young European Union, where politicians tend to leave difficult and unpopular decisions to the appointed delegates of the European Commission in Brussels, which everyone is happy to complain about. Europe has developed the doctrine of “subsidiarity,” that political decisions should be left to the smallest political unit that is competent to make the decision. How can this be applied to water management? What is the appropriate scale? Although the European Commission holds no brief to regulate every watershed in France and Spain, the way water is used in Aquitaine (a region of southwest France) can affect fishing in the Bay of Biscay, a matter of interest to Spain and other European countries as well as to France. The “stakeholders” in a river basin therefore include those whose activities depend on the quality and amount of water that the river sends to the sea. For rivers such as the Rhine or the Danube, flowing through several different European countries (fig. 10.3), basin management must be on the international scale, and indeed such international river management agencies have long been in existence in Europe and North America.8 Others have begun to take shape in Asia. Rivals India and Pakistan signed the Indus Waters Treaty in September 1960, and they have managed these waters in a spirit of cooperation despite the ongoing conflict over Kashmir. On the other hand, although a four-country (Kampuchea, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam) framework for cooperative development of the Mekong River basin was established as early as 1957 with United Nations and World Bank support, the Vietnam War and later the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia (Kampuchea) limited what could be accomplished.9 Resolution of conflicts of interest in water remains difficult, even for countries or states otherwise at peace. Hungary has sought to block Slovakia’s completion of the big Danube dam project started when the two countries were part of the “People’s Democratic Republics.” In North America, the waters of the Colorado River, born on the Western Slope of the Rockies, flow through desert and semidesert areas of five U.S. states, passing through Mexico before reaching the Gulf of California. All compete and litigate for use of this water. The Los Angeles metropolitan area is always thirsty, as is Phoenix, Arizona. And in California’s Palm Springs, winter quarters of Hollywood stars and other multimillionaires, the lawns and golf courses are always green, thanks to diverted water that evaporates into the dry Mojave Desert air, cooling the area.
The giant James Bay hydroelectric complex supplies the Province of Quebec with abundant electricity (more than 10,000 megawatts), but it has disrupted the ancestral way of life of the indigenous Cris and Inuit inhabitants of northern Quebec province. During the Soviet era, some visionaries proposed to irrigate “new lands” in Central Asia by reversing the course of some of the big rivers flowing northward to the Arctic, but today, after the disaster of the drying up of the Aral Sea, and with growing environmental awareness in the Russian public, few want to translate those dreams into what many suspect would be a nightmarish reality. Every so often, the idea of a titanic transport scheme for bringing water from the American and Canadian Northwest to southern California rears its head, but it’s probably another Hollywood fiction. Indulgence of L.A.’s never-ending thirst has its limits. Generally speaking, the big water problems will have to be resolved at the river basin level, and not in trying to transfer enormous quantities of water from one basin to another.10 Even within a basin, complications abound. Some would say that the technical solutions exist, and that all we need is the political will and courage.11 However, a good dose of diplomacy will help. And we still need to improve our understanding of land and water processes, and of people’s relation to them, in order to maintain a supply of daily bread and water to the six billion human beings (soon eight or even twelve) who depend on the uneven distribution of the water resources on our planet.
In its heyday, the USSR, like Pharaoh’s Egypt, organized colossal construction projects, building giant dams and hydroelectric power plants, flooding and irrigating large land areas. The transformed river basins stretch across what are now several different independent countries—Belarus, the Ukraine, the Russian Federation, and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia—with nuclear power plants located here and there. Today, few defend the way the waters of Lake Sevan (Armenia) were used, or the diversion of the rivers that flowed into the Aral Sea. As noted earlier, neither can the Soviet-inspired Aswân High Dam on the Nile in Egypt be regarded as a total success. At present, however, only Egypt makes intensive use of Nile water, which comes from Ethiopia and central Africa by way of Sudan. But suppose that one day Ethiopia decides to reduce soil erosion and to produce power by building a big dam on the Blue Nile?12
Such a question, hypothetical (so far) in the case of the Nile, has become a very real one in the case of Turkey’s Atatürk Dam and more generally its southeast Anatolia project or GAP, controlling and harnessing the headwaters of the Tigris and the Euphrates in the Taurus Mountains.13 This certainly has the potential of reducing downstream water flow vital for the economies of Syria and Iraq (fig. 12.1). In addition, if indeed Turkey develops irrigated agriculture while protecting its watershed from erosion, downstream water will contain less suspended matter, but possibly more pesticides, fertilizer, and salt. Turkey has asserted its desire to reach cooperative agreements for “equitable, reasonable, and optimal utilization” of Tigris and Euphrates waters, proposing to supply electric power as well as potable water to downstream Syria and Iraq, and also to pipe water to Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Note that construction of a further branch to Israel would be technically quite easy, but politically inconceivable without a final comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace. The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, two of the four rivers leaving the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:14), have always played an essential role in the irrigation of food-producing lands from the times of Mesopotamia, Assyria, and Babylon to modern-day Syria and Iraq, including those regions with large Kurdish populations. “Hydropolitics” was perhaps not an important factor in 1920, when a Kurdish state was promised (only to be abandoned later), but with its enormous investments in the GAP, resistance of increasingly powerful Turkey to any hint of Kurdish autonomy, not to mention statehood, is stronger than ever.14 Although the growing importance of the water dimension in Middle Eastern politics cannot be denied, it must be recognized that both the Iran-Iraq war and the 1991 Gulf War were still about oil and access to the sea rather than freshwater. Also, despite some scary suggestions, the possibility of stopping water from reaching Iraq was not put into effect as a weapon in 1991.
FIGURE 12.1 The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers originate in southeast Anatolia (Turkey) and now run through Syria and Iraq, finally emptying together into the Persian Gulf by way of the Shatt-el-Arab channel between Basra (Iraq) and Abadan (Iran). The Ataturk Dam is the largest of the many dams constructed or planned in Turkey’s GAP.
WATER BETWEEN ISRAEL AND THE ARABS
Sharp competition surrounds the much smaller water flows from Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon into the Jordan River of Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian authority, but does the water dimension play a major role in the conflict between Israel and the Arabs? It seems to me that the answer must be both yes and no. The basic conflict is about land but, over most of human history, that meant land with water. Only recently has anyone coveted desert, and only oil-rich desert at that.15 When the seminomadic Israelite tribe of Abram left Babylon, and Abram become Abraham profited from a temporary decline in Egypt’s power to invade and occupy, with his sons Ishmael and Isaac, the land of Canaan, the problem was indeed to find water (Genesis 21:19–31 and 26:15–23), which they did, at Beersheba.16 Drought forced emigration to Egypt with its reliable Nile water, stockpiled grain, and slavery, but after the Exodus and return to the Promised Land,17 and following the establishment of the united kingdom of Israel, the choice of Jerusalem as capital by King David (1004–965 B.C.) was fortunate in that the city had good access to water in the nearby pulsating karstic spring of En-Gihon. Between 705 and 701 B.C., Hezekiah, king of Judah, anticipating an Assyrian invasion, had a remarkable underground tunnel dug through over 500 meters of solid rock to convey water from the Gihon spring (which he had hid by surrounding walls) to the Siloam Pool.18 This was an essential factor in the city’s “miraculous” resistance to the siege by Sennacherib.19 It did not, however, prevent the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586 B.C., when the First Temple was destroyed. Following the return of the Jews from Babylonian exile in 538 B.C. and establishment of the Second Temple, the water supply was at times placed under the responsibility of the High Priest; but by the time of Jesus, it had been forgotten that the waters in the Siloam Pool actually came from Gihon spring.20 Jerusalem, stronghold of the Great Revolt against the Roman Empire, was destroyed in 70 A.D. by Titus’s legions, who had starved out the resistance by surrounding the city with walls.
Following several centuries of Roman and, later, Byzantine (Christian) rule, following the Muslim conquest in 638 A.D. and Arab rule briefly interrupted by the Crusader incursion (1009 to 1187 A.D.), the Ottoman Empire ruled Palestine as a minor province, by way of governors in Damascus, from 1516 up to World War I. Modern Zionism appeared only in the nineteenth century, a reaction against European anti-Semitism as much as a semireligious movement, with an ideology of return to the land, land presumably with water. When the British mandate was established in 1919, conditions in Palestine and indeed over much of North Africa and the Near East had become very different from Roman times when these areas produced large amounts of grain. Although some tended to put the blame on the grazing by goats belonging to Bedouins, on Arabs in general, or on Ottoman neglect, the desertification of many of these regions may also have been related to climate change. At any rate, the Zionist ambition was to “make the desert bloom,” and the ideology included many elements in common both with American “can-do” philosophy and with technological optimism of the socialist movement. The Israeli-Arab conflict, a competition for land, necessarily also has a water dimension, because application of modern agricultural methods cannot do away with the need for water even if it can in principle render water use more efficient. With the development of the largely modern and rich Israeli society, water withdrawals have grown more rapidly than the population, and Israel now uses at least 100 percent of its renewable freshwater resources. Growth of the Palestinian Arab population, and significant although still limited economic development, also have increased water demand.
“Hydropolitics” has become distinct from geopolitics both because of increased awareness of the interconnectedness of ground and surface water resources over extended areas, and because it is now technically possible both to stop river flow and to transport water over large distances. In the Middle East, competition and conflict between Assyria and Babylon once concerned living space along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, but today Syria and Iraq fear Turkey’s ability to impound the water before it reaches them. In North Africa, Libya’s “Great Man-Made River” may be pumping some water from an aquifer extending in part under Egypt. In the Near East, Palestine’s strategic position between Egypt (the Nile) and Mesopotamia (the Tigris and Euphrates) inevitably made it a focus of contention in biblical times. Today, in addition to the Israeli-Arab conflict over land, there is competition and potential conflict over water. Israel’s National Water Carrier, completed in 1964 (three years before the Six-Day War), pumps more than 400 million cubic meters of water per year from the Sea of Galilee (Kinneret), supplying farms as far as 250 km (150 mi.) to the south (fig. 12.2). However, although Kinneret lies entirely within Israel,21 less than half of the upper Jordan River flow to Kinneret originates in Israel, essentially the 250 million cubic meters per year from the spring of Dan, the rest coming from Lebanon and Syria.22 Although Israel gained control of some of the Jordan’s tributaries in the Six-Day War of June 1967, this was hardly a factor in that conflict, which was triggered when Egypt took measures to block Israel’s Red Sea outlet to the south. Was it a significant factor in 1979–1982 Israeli operations in Lebanese territory, which reached the Litani River? The answer is not clear.23 However, Israel is extremely sensitive to any Syrian or Lebanese attempts to withdraw water from the Banias or Hasbani Rivers, because of the potential impact of such withdrawals on the Jordan River’s flow into Kinneret.24 Israeli military action in 1965 and 1966 effectively ended Syria’s Headwater Diversion Plan, and following the Six-Day War, Israel controlled nearly all of the Jordan headwaters.
Serious conflict also exists over groundwater, both directly and indirectly related to the conflict over land. The coastal plain aquifer extends from Carmel (near Haifa) in the north to the Palestinian Gaza Strip in the south (fig. 12.2), and although enough rain falls in winter to support some farming, intensive modern Israeli agriculture requires pumping of ground-water. In addition, because of extremely high population density in the Gaza Strip, as well as very high water usage by Jewish settler farms, the aquifer there is being pumped at about 120 million cubic meters per year, nearly twice the sustainable rate, and salt content has reached excessively high levels. Over the Israeli portion of the coastal plain, pumping of groundwater exceeds recharge of the aquifer (infiltration of rainfall together with recharge from irrigated lands and wastewater recycling) by some 240 to 300 million cubic meters per year, there too compounding the risk of salinization by seawater intrusion.
Further complicating this issue, recharge of the mostly Israeli coastal aquifer depends in part on infiltration from the fairly well-watered mountain aquifer, over essentially Palestinian territory, historically corresponding to the post-Solomon pre-Roman Jewish kingdoms of Judah and Israel, areas called Judea and Samaria by Israelis. Indeed, some charge that as much as a third of the water used in Israel comes from groundwater from rain that falls over the western mountain aquifer and infiltrates westward toward the coastal aquifer. Until the Israeli occupation’s start in 1967, the inhabitants of this “West Bank” of Jordan practiced mostly rain-fed agriculture, with some groundwater withdrawal for urban water supply. With population growth and introduction of more intensive agriculture, increased withdrawals from the western mountain aquifer reduce the water available in the coastal plain below and may allow enhanced seawater intrusion into the coastal aquifer. Israeli specialists also fear pollution flowing into the coastal aquifer if West Bank agriculture intensifies, and recognizing that some of the water pumped in the coastal plain comes from the mountain aquifer, they argue that prior use (prior to the Six-Day War) gives them a legal voice on what is done with and to the mountain water. The argument has its analogy in Syrian and Iraqi objections to Turkey’s GAP. Israeli geohydrologist Arie Issar has, however, argued that the one dollar per cubic meter cost of desalinating Mediterranean water could easily be borne by the rich Israeli economy, and that (writing in an Israeli voice) “we and the Palestinians have the obligation to draw up a cooperative regional plan for water resources utilization (as part of a regional plan with our other neighbors), that will permit development of our respective agricultural and urban sectors. In their well-being lies our own, while their economic deterioration, with its great attendant disappointment in the peace process, is a sure recipe for the ascendancy of religious fundamentalism and the continued reign of terror in the region.”25 Palestinians and some Israelis accuse the Israeli occupation authorities of unfairly limiting access to water by Arab inhabitants of the West Bank, and in some cases of including previously operating wells in forbidden security areas, while giving a much freer rein to new Jewish settlements with high water-consumption rates. Israel has also been accused of “stealing” rain that would normally fall on Palestinian lands by cloud-seeding operations in northern Israel.26 Moreover, some Palestinians believe that increased salinity of water from wells supplying Jericho results from intrusion of Dead Sea water due to pumping of deeper groundwater by Jewish settlements in the area of the eastern mountain aquifer. Thus, the conflict over the land occupied by Jewish settlements in the West Bank concerns not just that land but an interconnected system of runoff and infiltration of water.
FIGURE 12.2 Water between Israel and its neighbors. The heavy dashed line represents the groundwater divide between west and east mountain aquifers, running mostly through Palestinian territory in the “West Bank,” occupied by (formerly Trans-)Jordan from 1948 to 1967, by Israel since June 1967. The heavy arrows represent groundwater flow, mostly toward Israel. Dashed arrows represent saltwater intrusion along the coastal aquifer from south of Haifa to the Gaza Strip (Palestinian territory, occupied by Egypt from 1948 to 1967, by Israel since June 1967). In the northeast, occupation of Syrian territory since June 1967 has given Israel control over most of the Jordan River’s headwaters. Boundaries on the map correspond to the 1949 Armistice Demarcation Line and the boundary of the former Palestine Mandate. Jewish settlements within Palestinian and Syrian territories are not shown. Only the main components of Israel’s National Water Carrier are shown. This map is adapted from United Nations map no. 3652 (September 1991), which includes the sentence: “The designation employed and the presentation of material on this map do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the United Nations concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.” The Sea of Galilee (Kinneret) is identified as Lake Tiberias.
Despite all these conflicts, there was progress toward peace in the 1990s. The Israel-Jordan peace treaty of 1994 specifically includes water-sharing issues, as does the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian “Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-government Arrangements,” with its call for creation of a Palestinian Water Authority. Israeli and Arab specialists have met many times and worked together on issues of water management and the reduction of water pollution, regarding both groundwater and runoff in the Near East and discharges into the Mediterranean. All of this now (in mid-2002) appears severely compromised, as religious and nationalist fanaticism, fear, and violence gain the upper hand in an ever-worsening situation.27 Because the atmosphere takes and brings water over borders across the entire world, because water on and in the ground inevitably links the destinies of all those who inhabit a river basin or even larger region, it appears difficult to solve the increasingly serious water crisis facing both the rich and scientifically advanced Israelis and the impoverished Palestinians without cooperation. But what are the chances of cooperation, if each side is blind to the legitimacy of the other’s presence?