Reverse Osmosis to Rescue Water Scarcity in the Dead Sea

Engineers and scientists are expected to use Reverse Osmosis (RO) technology to merge the Dead and the Red seas under the “Two Seas Canal Project” worth 10 billion dollars.

   

RO, occurs when water is moved across a membrane against a concentration gradient from lower to higher concentration, under pressure to force ions, molecules and bacteria to be filtered, which is used purposely for the commercial desalination of seawater.

   

The project, to run in three-phases would be financed through international and multi-national institutions with counterpart funding from beneficiary countries, namely, Palestine, Jordan and Israel, would haul in 700,000 cubic metres of water into the Dead Sea from the Red Sea, a distance of 180 kilometres.

    

Results of feasibility studies and Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) supported by the World Bank and other donors are yet to be released for concrete works to commence. 

    

The region is witnessing water scarcity with its main freshwater source, the River Jordan, which has kept shrinking in size and posing declines in its annual flow from more than 1.3 billion cubic meters per year to less than 30 million cubic meters annually.

    

With Israel, Jordan and Syria, each grabbing as much clean water as they could, it is ironically the sewage that is keeping the river alive today.

    

In fact, water scarcity is a disincentive to many in the agriculture and industrial sectors as well as for domestic consumption, largely due to urbanization, pollution and global warming.

    

Mr Batir Wardam, environment expert and researcher, said the project, though ambitious, is expected to revive the biodiversity and water scarcity in the region.

    

He called for use of science to distinguish between myths and reality while urging the media to lead the crusade by setting the right agenda.

    

General Secretary of the Ministry of Water, Mr Bassem Talfah, said the situation is scary, which demands prompt action hence the invitation to the private sector to strike partnership with to government to diversify funding and implementation of the project.

    

He said the sector needs higher investment portfolios resulting from higher financial outlays in production cost stating that this manifests in a financial gap of One Billion Jordanian Dinar.

    

Mr Khaled Irani, President of Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature, said the problem of water scarcity is not only a humanitarian issue but economic as well.

   

“Sixty-six percent of water is imported into Jordan of which 15 percent goes into agricultural activities. We cannot wait for the commencement of this project as its prospects are overwhelming.”  

    

He entreated stakeholders to avoid knee-jerk reactions even as the recommendations are released and positive that the project would provide an alternative means for water in the country and beyond.

   

Contrarily, Dr Samir Mahmoud, media expert, said double-political commitment was needed to actualize the Two-Seas canal project as it is “haunted by political inactivity.”

   

“With the pace of development and disregard for timelines, the canal project will not see the light of day now, not within the next two decades,” he suggested.

He said merging the two seas would have an environmental catastrophe for Jordan, especially for occupying the lowest bit of the project.

   

Dr Mahmoud explained that Jordan’s location with increased salinity could be a bouquet for destabilization of the ecology in relation to marine life and culture of the Dead Sea.

ghananewsagency.org

Sandra Postel Talks About the Key to Restoring Our Watershed

How could you explain what an intact watershed looks like?

So a watershed is really the gathering place for the river - all the land, all the forests all the wetlands that exist across the landscape sort of feed into the river. So how we manage the land directly impacts the quality and the health of the river. And so the quality of the water as Luna Leopold says, in some sense the health of our waters are the clearest measure of how we live on the land.

So how exactly do those components come together to create clean healthy water?

I think of a watershed as kind of a nature’s water factory. The components really work together to create reliable clean water. And all those parts work together just like a water treatment plant except that it’s run on free solar energy and it’s all done by nature and so that system is a beautiful system that unfortunately we’ve intervened with in how we’ve managed the land.

Here in North America how do we impact watersheds?

We’re a population of 300 million people now and so we’ve expanded out into the watersheds to live in rural towns and big cities and as a consequence we’ve converted the landscape to a more human landscape and removed a lot of the pieces of the ecosystem that do this important work.

And so those pieces gradually get whittled away and as a consequence the quality and reliability of the water supply begins to diminish.

What do you mean when you say “more rivers will be rivers again”?

We had 5,000 large dams around the world in 1950. We have 50,000 large dams around the world today. So we’ve been building on average two large dams a day, every day for half a century and this is a major hydrologic change in a very short period of time.

If you think about what a dam does it does a lot of really good things for us. It generates hydropower and it controls floods and supplies irrigation water and drinking water, provides recreational opportunities but if you think from an ecological perspective what the dam does it’s disconnecting the river from all these different parts of its watershed.

So the dam creates a disconnection of the river with its channel, because it changes the flow. It creates a disconnection of the river from its floodplain because the river doesn’t flood. And it creates a disconnection downstream if the river no longer reaches the sea, because the water is parceled out along the way. And each of those disconnections has an ecological impact.

And so when I talk about rivers flowing like rivers again my hope is that we’ll begin to apply some ecological intelligence to how we manage rivers and dams. And go back and say yes these dams are doing good things but can we give the river something back. Can we give the river back the flows it needs to be healthy.

alexandracousteau.org

Sandra Postel directs the independent Global Water Policy Project, based in New Mexico, and lectures, writes and consults on global water issues. She is the National Geographic Society's first Freshwater Fellow, and serves as lead water expert for the Society's Freshwater Initiative. Postel is also a fellow of the Post Carbon Institute.