Jordan, Israel & Water Wars
Water & The Middle East
More than 90% of the water is being diverted by Israel, Jordan and Syria, Friends of the Earth Middle East say.
The group have called on the governments in the region to take immediate action to save the river.
The river is also heavily polluted and now contains 20% untreated sewage, the organisation says.
The 1994 Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty obliges both governments to protect the Jordan "against any pollution, contamination or harm".
At a conference on an island on the river this week the Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian governments recognised the scale of the problem, but promised no specific action to deal with it.
"We don't think this is good enough," Gidon Bromberg of Friends of the Earth Middle East told the BBC News website.
"In the last 10 years the governments have done nothing - in fact they've made the problem worse."
Agriculture
The river is already running dry in some areas and Friends of the Earth estimate that it could dry out completely within two years.
The pollution in the Jordan flows into the Dead Sea, which itself is under threat and has shrunk by 30% in the last 50 years.
Environmentalists want governments the United Nations to protect the river - a holy site for Christians, Jews and Muslims - by placing it on the UNESCO World Heritage list.
The two leaders unveiled a plaque to mark the start of work on the Wahdah Dam, before heading to the Syrian capital, Damascus, for talks.
The $90m dam - due to be completed by the end of 2005 - will provide Jordan with water and Syria with power.
The dam's construction has been delayed due to funding difficulties.
Jordan's Water Minister, Hazem Nasser, warned that the dam "will not solve Jordan's water problems".
But he said it would make an "important contribution by reducing by around 10% Jordan's water deficit".
The hydro-electric project linked to the dam is expected to produce 18,800 megawatt hours of electricity a year. Most of the power will be supplied to Syria.
Mr Nasser said Jordan would foot the large proportion of the bill for the dam's construction.
Aug 6/02 - Turkey and Israel have reached a deal under which Ankara will sell the Israelis 50 million cubic metres of water annually for the next two decades.
The countries had been discussing the issue for several years as part of efforts to alleviate Israel's serious water shortage.
It means Israel may be less dependent on water from disputed sources.
However, despite the nations' strong ties, some Israelis would prefer to desalinate more sea water rather than depend on Turkey, even if only for a small proportion of its water.
Strong relationship
Water is a scarce and precious commodity in the Middle East and is an underlying factor in tensions between Israel, Syria, Jordan and the Palestinians.
BBC - Jul 00 - The Syrian Water Minister, Taha al-Atrash, has said that his country will provide Jordan with three-and-a-half million cubic meters of water this summer.
Mr Atrash said that the water would be pumped over the next two months to help prevent drought in Jordan.
OTHER WATER STORIES
China dam switches on power
BBC - Jul 10/03 - China's Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest water control project, has begun generating electricity.
The first of the dam's 26 generators to go into operation was connected to the power grid at 0131 local time on Thursday (1831 GMT on Wednesday), 20 days ahead of schedule, Xinhua news agency reported.
The generating unit will supply 12.9 million kWh per day to the power grids in central and east China, the project's vice general manager said.
Yang Qing said the unit would have to pass a 30-day trial operation, before beginning commercial production in August.
The combined energy of all the dam's 26 generators will eventually generate more than 80 billion kWh of electricity each year.
Massive project
The Three Gorges dam is unprecedented in both the scale of its construction and the number of people who have been forced to move to make way for the project.
By the time it is completed, the water level will reach a depth of 175 metres (574 feet), and create a reservoir which is 600 kilometres (375 miles) long.
Many villages and towns - and even some small cities - along the banks of the densely populated Yangtze have already been submerged by the rising waters.
More than 600,000 people have been forced to relocate, some as far away as Shanghai, 1,000 km (600 miles) east. About 1.3 million people will eventually have to move.
Arctic ice shelf splits
Sept 03 - BBC - The largest ice shelf in the Arctic has fractured, releasing all the water from the freshwater lake it dammed
Indian officials insist that the project is at a very early stage and that concerned neighbours will be consulted before the plans are firmed up.
But the proposals received new impetus recently when India's Supreme Court asked the government to speed up its plans to improve the management of water resources.
India set up a task force in November last year to develop a consensus within the country and with its neighbours.
A feasibility study is scheduled for completion in 2005, but given the concerns of other countries and Indian states it could take longer.
BBC - Mar 03 - After eight days of discussions involving 12,000 participants, mountains of paper and lakes of coffee, beer and sake, the Third World Water Forum ended with this ringing endorsement from the World Conservation Union:
"The (ministerial) declaration will have virtually no impact on national policies. There is nothing in the text which will make a difference."
International conferences are often described as talking shops. Not this one. It was a giant talking hypermarket.
Spread over three Japanese cities - Kyoto, Osaka and Shiga - the Forum brought together a vast army of water professionals, companies, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), bureaucrats and ministers.
'Model of blandness'
They were turning their collective minds to the practical steps needed to alleviate the chronic shortage of clean water and sanitation facilities faced by billions of the world's poor.
Inevitably their deliberations were overshadowed by the dramatic events beamed through to delegates on screens throughout the various venues - as it happens, from one of the most water-stressed regions of the world: Iraq.
But even if the world's attention had not been occupied by war, would the forum have merited more interest than it actually achieved?
In terms of solid outcomes, almost certainly not. The six-page declaration agreed by ministers on the final day is a model of blandness, at best repeating commitments made at previous conferences and in some respects moving backwards.
Big projects
What frustrates environmental groups here is the scant attention paid by ministers to the importance of using natural environments to conserve the supply of fresh water - with the emphasis instead on big building projects such as dams and pipelines.
Jamie Pittock, of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, commented: "We have to ask how credible a forum like this is, when governments do not draw on the 12,000 water specialists gathered together to identify common sense solutions to water problems, but instead continue to promote massive infrastructure as the sole solution to the world's water crisis."
So has the whole thing been a waste of time and money? Well, not completely.
'Real conflicts' over world's water
Mar 20/03 - BBC - Former USSR president Mikhail Gorbachev has told the Third World Water Forum in Kyoto that a failure to reverse the global water crisis could lead to "real conflicts" in the future.
Mr Gorbachev, who is now president of the International Green Cross, said that there were likely to be severe problems as the demands on water increased together with the planet's population.
It is estimated that by 2025, two thirds of the world's people will be living in areas of acute water stress.
"If current trends continue, we could be faced with a very grave situation," Mr Gorbachev warned.
It is feared conflicts could arise in areas where rivers and river basins cross state borders.
If a country near a river's source begins using more water, this lowers the amount that reaches countries further downstream.
For example, there is currently concern about what effect a proposed scheme in India to divert the Ganges to currently dry areas might have on the water supply downstream in Bangladesh.
Basin approach
Mr Gorbachev said all countries in river basins would have to co-operate to prevent tensions.
"Water management can only be effective based on the basin approach," he said. "All countries - the entire basin has to be considered together. Otherwise, the dominant countries could control [the water]."
And he stressed that there must be an improvement on the current situation.
"A great majority of countries have not reaffirmed their commitment to co-operate on water resources. We are facing some real conflicts."
Many multi-governmental committees in river basins already exist, but countries are often reluctant to share information.
Mar 18/03 - BBC - Pressure groups have claimed that private companies are unlikely to provide the solutions for the millions of poor people without adequate clean water and decent sanitation
Speaking on the third day of the Third World Water Forum in Japan, Water Aid and Tearfund hit out at international lending institutions such as the World Bank for their "obsession" with the private sector.
The groups launched a report showing, they say, that international companies are not interested in working in very poor countries - and they argue that policy-makers need instead to focus on enabling local and central governments to serve the poor through working with local communities.
Eric Gutierrez of Water Aid said: "The international private sector currently only provides 5% of all the water services in the world, very largely in richer and more developed countries.
"The obsession with the private sector to provide clean water to those most in need is a total distraction. We must move on to stop the millions of needless deaths from water-related diseases."
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