Our Water Rations Keep Getting Cut
Life here teaches you to appreciate water as a finite resource.
Our water rations keep getting cut. At the this rate, we’re going to have been on half-rations for an entire month.
Those sentences sound pretty dramatic, almost like science fiction. But that’s just life in Jordan, the second most water-scarce country in the world. Most buildings in Amman don’t have a continuous water supply. Instead, every apartment has a water tank — usually one or two cubic meters — that gets filled once a week.
Most of the time, it’s something you don’t have to think about. Some habits of life are different from more water-rich regions. Showers are short, dishwashing is more careful, and laundry should be done on the day that the water comes.
Last week, the water didn’t come. It’s coming this week, and then will be cut off the week after that. Two weeks of water rations are supposed to last us an entire month. Now we really have to count every gallon.
Life here teaches you to appreciate water as a finite resource.
According to the authorities, these specific shutoffs are because of maintenance on the pipe system. However, the big picture is that the water is getting more scare. This summer, Amman faced a three-week water outage, and the Mujib Dam reservoir eventually ran completely dry.
Reporting on the three-week outage, the New York Times explained the fundamentals of Jordan’s water crisis:
The country’s namesake river is nearly running dry. The flow in the Jordan River is less than 10 percent of its historical average, and the Yarmouk River, a major tributary, is greatly diminished. The Jordan’s once-rushing waters feed into the Dead Sea, a saltwater lake that is disappearing.
The rivers are uneasily shared with neighbors: Israel and Syria upstream have diverted water for years for their own use. Increasing supply from these sources is challenging, particularly with Israel, which has had a chilly peace with Jordan for decades now.
All of this has led to an overreliance on extracting groundwater from aquifers below the earth’s surface. The aquifers are being drained at roughly twice the rate at which they can be replenished naturally and now account for about 60 percent of the country’s water supply.
That’s the Jordan River, the one from the Bible: “And Lot lifted up his eyes, and beheld all the plain of Jordan, that it was well watered every where, before the LORD destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, even as the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt, as thou comest unto Zoar.”
While supply dries up, demand is booming. Jordan has hosted waves of Palestinian, Iraqi, and Syrian refugees — numbered in the millions, not thousands — who have nowhere else to go.
And water management is poor, or rather non-existent. Around half of Jordan’s water disappears from the accounting system due to theft, leaks, and billing errors, according to U.S. government research.
As for the solution, the New York Times explains:
Desalination is a promising lifeline for Jordan, but it will not happen quickly. A large-scale desalination project in the port city of Aqaba on the Red Sea is in the works, but it will take years.
There is one potential quick fix: buying more water from Israel, a pioneer in desalination techniques. Cooperation on water was an important element of the 1994 peace treaty between the two countries, and they signed a water-for-energy agreement at the United Nations climate conference in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheikh on Tuesday.
Protests broke out in Amman last year when the plan, which was brokered by the United Arab Emirates and would involve Jordan sending solar energy to Israel in exchange for water, was first announced. An overreliance on Israel water is unpalatable to many Jordanians, who oppose the occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Although the situation in Jordan is uniquely precarious, many other places are going to face water issues due to climate change. One of my colleagues, a water expert, said he’s studying the Middle East specifically to learn lessons for America’s future.
California has been forced to cut its water usage dramatically, and the per capita use in some counties is as low as 40 gallons per day. For comparison, the typical water tank in Amman is between 264 and 528 gallons, which comes out to a water ration of 37 to 75 gallons per day — split between a whole family, of course.
So the sentence I started with might not be so outlandish in an American context soon.
Our water rations keep getting cut. At the this rate, we’re going to have been on half-rations for an entire month.
(The views expressed here do not represent the views of the Fulbright Program, the U.S. Department of State, or any of its partner organizations.)