As one of the warmest and most arid places in the world, water has always played a significant role in shaping the socio-economic development of the Middle East. Water scarcity in the Middle East, as a consequence of its limited freshwater sources, has prompted countries in the region to prioritize water management efforts towards augmenting water supplies. As such, desalination is now a big part of meeting this shortfall in water supply. So much so, that nearly 50% of all of the world’s freshwater desalination occurs in the Arabian Gulf. But water management is more than finding or creating new water supplies, even for a place like the Middle East where that water management objective eclipses all others. This is especially true as the impacts of climate change have increased in terms of intensity, duration, and frequency, and made all aspects of water management more challenging.
Warming in an already hotter than (globally) average region has been a driver of severe drought conditions that have both reduced freshwater supplies and inflated water demands. In the case of the Nile River Basin, this has translated to less water generated from the Ethiopian Highlands making its way to Egypt, an extremely water-stressed country that is almost wholly reliant on the waters of the Nile. When this hydrological deficiency is coupled with the operation and filling of the newly completed Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Africa’s largest hydropower dam, it is clear to see why tensions between these upstream and downstream Nile riparians have intensified.
Water scarcity in the Middle East has prompted countries to prioritize water management efforts towards augmenting water supplies
A similar situation is also taking place in the Tigris-Euphrates River system, where reduced streamflow from the headwaters of the system has prompted Türkiye, the most upstream riparian, to store more water in its dams to the detriment of its downstream neighbours. The consequences of this have been (negatively) several-fold to Iraq, at the tail end of the river system. Not only does less water reach Iraq from a combination of diminished river flow (due to warming) and Türkiye’s water hoarding, but the subsequent shrinking of the river waterways exposed fine sand from the previously submerged river bed that gets picked up by regional winds, thus increasing the incidence of dust storms. Furthermore, the reduction of river flow has led to an intrusion of seawater from the Arabian Gulf, increasing the salinity and declining the quality of water in Iraq near the terminus of the river system.
How water is transmitted and regulated when water consumption needs are high also poses difficulties. For example, there is the staggering statistics from Jordan and Lebanon where over 40% of water transmitted in urban areas is lost. This water loss is a combination of leaks in old urban water transmission networks and illegal water diversions. Such a large amount of non-revenue water can certainly be associated with economic conditions that lead to neglect in water infrastructure repair and drive up incidences of water theft. Persistent conflict and economic instability in Syria have also driven citizens to acquire and drink unsafe and unclean water, resulting in multiple outbreaks of cholera in the country.
These regional examples illustrate that water management is not simply constrained to issues of supply and demand, but rather when overlayed with the additional challenges of climate change and warming, water management becomes a proxy for addressing other connected issues in the Middle East. In this sense, water can incentivize the resolution of geopolitical impasses, the mitigation of public health crises, better socio-economic conditions, and enhanced infrastructure maintenance. Therefore the role of water and what it provides needs to take on a greater importance in the Middle East, not just for the basic service it provides but also for the implicit benefit it offers to meeting other climate-inflated challenges in the region.