A land without water: the scramble to stop Jordan from running dry
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Half a century ago, Azraq was legendary. Historical photos show ponds flanked by thick clusters of reeds and squat date palms. A shot from 1965, which hangs today in a local lodge, shows a man waist-deep in Shishan Pool. He is fishing, his net suspended in mid-air. All of this — Azraq’s mudflats, marshes and pools — depended on reserves of underground water replenished by yearly rains. In the early 1980s, Jordan’s government began drilling wells near Azraq and pumping millions of cubic metres of water annually from the aquifers — underground layers of porous rock and sediment. Farmers began unfettered pumping of their own.
Soon, the aquifer was losing water faster than rains could refill it. In 1987, the springs that fed the two main pools in northern Azraq stopped flowing. By 1990, the pools dried up. Today, the water table has dropped from the surface to tens of metres below ground. This is happening not just in Azraq, but in aquifers across Jordan.
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Wells that tap the aquifers supply nearly 60% of the water consumed in the country, with the rest coming from surface-water supplies such as the Sea of Galilee and the River Jordan (see ‘Without water’). Some 45% of the water usage goes to agriculture. Meanwhile, municipal water networks lose roughly half their water to theft and leaks.
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Of Jordan’s 12 groundwater basins, 10 are being pumped at a deficit. Overall, groundwater is being extracted at twice the rate that it is replenished, according to the Jordanian water ministry. At this pace, the looming question for Jordan’s aquifers is not if they will be depleted, but when.
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To Al-Younes, who grew up in Azraq, the restoration (
with water they are pumping from the aquifer... K ) is a feeble attempt to revive a place long ago destroyed by lack of foresight. She left Azraq in the early 2000s, following her children to Amman, where opportunity abounded in comparison to the dusty stopover that Azraq has become.
“You have to think about the future, about the people who will live here,” Al-Younes says. “Unfortunately, no one thinks this way at all.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02600-wInteresting article on Jordan with a rather depressing conclusion.