You would be hard-pressed to find a corner of the world free from microplastics, plastic particles measuring less than five millimetres. They contaminate our drinking water, accumulate in the food we eat and have been found in the human body, including in blood, organs, placenta, semen and breast milk.

In April, delegates from across the world came together in Ottawa for the fourth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to develop a legally binding international treaty on plastic pollution. The meeting offered a unique opportunity to identify strategies for addressing the human and environmental health impacts of plastics, including microplastics.

But do we really know what it would take to mitigate the rising amounts of microplastics in the environment?

This article is part of our series Our lakes: their secrets and challenges. This summer, The Conversation and La Conversation invite you to take a fascinating dip in our lakes. With magnifying glasses, microscopes and diving goggles, our scientists scrutinize the biodiversity of our lakes and the processes that unfold in them, and tell us about the challenges they face. Don’t miss our articles on these incredibly rich bodies of water!

In the Great Lakes, plastic pollution along the shorelines poses a major challenge: 86 per cent of litter collected on Great Lakes beaches is either partially or completely composed of plastic. This is worrisome, given the lakes supply 40 million people with drinking water and represent a combined GDP of US$6 trillion. Yet, recent studies show levels of microplastics reaching up to thousands of particles per cubic metre in some areas of the lakes.

Mismanaged plastic waste

Improving waste management alone is unlikely to address microplastic pollution in the Great Lakes. Consider one of the most common pieces of litter on a beach: a 500 ml plastic bottle. If that bottle is not picked up and placed in a landfill or recycled, over the years it will break down into microplastics; the complete disintegration of the bottle into 100 micrometre size particles would produce 25 million microplastics.

Based on reported concentrations of microplastics and water flow rates of the Great Lakes, we can estimate the yearly amounts of plastic that need to be entering the lakes to match the concentrations of microplastics currently observed.

For Lake Superior, this adds up to the same mass of plastic contained in 1,000 bottles. But Lake Superior is the cleanest of the Great Lakes. For Lakes Huron, Michigan, Erie and Ontario, the corresponding estimates are 3,000, two million, 18,000, and nine million bottles, respectively.

According to the Canadian government’s own estimation, Canadians living in the Great Lakes Basin throw away more than 1.5 million tons of plastic waste each year, equivalent to 64 billion 500 ml bottles. If we include the United States, the total amount of plastic waste in the Great Lakes Basin rises to 21 million tons per year (or 821 billion 500 ml bottles).

For Canada and the U.S., the fraction of mismanaged plastic waste that leaks into the environment because it is not recycled, incinerated or landfilled is estimated to be between four and seven per cent.

According to our calculations, this means that it would take less than 0.001 per cent of the total mass of plastics consumed annually within the Great Lakes Basin to generate the number of microplastics present in the lakes. In other words, just 0.02 per cent of the mismanaged plastic waste already explains the microplastic concentrations in the Great Lakes — the other 99.8 per cent ending up as macro- to micro-sized litter in soils, waterways, ponds, beaches and biota.

What these calculations imply is that the shedding of even very minor, and arguably unavoidable, microplastic particles over the lifetime of a product can lead to significant accumulations of environmental microplastics, including in areas far removed from their source.

While better plastic waste management can help alleviate microplastics pollution, we should not count on it to bring down the microplastics concentrations in all five Great Lakes.

Curbing pollution

Microplastic pollution comes not only from plastic litter in the environment, but also from plastic that is thrown in the trash bin. Even long-lived plastics, such as those that are used in the construction industry, shed microplastics through natural wear and tear.

Once they enter an ecosystem, microplastics become extremely difficult and expensive to clean up. Recycling is the best option currently available, but even this process has been shown to produce microplastics.

At present, less than 10 per cent of plastic is recycled worldwide. With plastic production predicted to triple by 2060, achieving a fully circular plastic economy — where all plastic produced is recycled without shedding microplastic particles — faces huge economic, social, environmental and technological challenges.

And it would take many years to establish such a system, all while microplastic pollution continues to worsen. If we are serious about reducing microplastics concentrations in the environment, the reasonable course of action would be to start reducing plastic production and consumption now.

Lewis Alcott, Lecturer in Geochemistry, University of Bristol; Fereidoun Rezanezhad, Research Associate Professor, Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of Waterloo; Nancy Goucher, Knowledge Mobilization Specialist, University of Waterloo; Philippe Van Cappellen, Professor of Biogeochemistry and Canada Excellence Research Chair Laureate in Ecohydrology, University of Waterloo, and Stephanie Slowinski, Research Biogeochemist, University of Waterloo

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Northern Michigan Environmental Action Video: “Microplastics in the Great Lakes with Art Hirsch”

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi died on May 19 while returning from a ceremony to inaugurate a hydropower project in a remote corner of northwestern Iran. Why would a head of state brave the hazardous conditions of unseasonal blizzards in a mountainous region to open a run-of-the-mill water and power project? Why not send his minister for energy to stand in for him? Why was the project so important as to even invite the head of state of neighboring Azerbaijan, which had only three months ago shut down its embassy in Tehran to protest a violent attack on its staff?

The answer: climate change.

As much as 97 percent of Iran suffers from a 30-year drought. Droughts are  exacerbated by two major factors: a dramatic drop in precipitation and an evaporation driven by scorching temperatures. On average, Iran receives 250 millimeters of rain a year, which is close to one-third of the global average. Yet two-thirds of Iran’s average precipitation evaporates each year. Certain spatial and temporal variations in rainfall patterns leave much of the country vulnerable to drought.

True to these variations, Iran’s Caspian Sea basin is the wettest of all with rainfall as high as 1,600 millimeters per year. Yet climate-induced water scarcity and evaporation of moisture in other parts of the country are exacting a heavy toll on Iran’s already dwindling water resources. A case in point is the agriculture sector, which now guzzles 93 percent of national freshwater supplies. Scarcity of water has become the catalyst of climate-induced drought that Raisi was combatting with the opening of dam and hydropower projects.

No Iranian president had been more proactively responding to climate-induced scarcity in the country than Raisi. His “water diplomacy” was meant to elevate relations with neighboring states—such as Azerbaijan and Armenia, which share transboundary waterways—to a “special level.” The imperative to secure water resources put Iran on the side of Christian Armenia against Muslim Azerbaijan during their 30-year violent conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. In response, Azerbaijan sought help from Israel and Turkey, which provided Baku with heavy artillery, rocket launchers, and attack drones, especially for the final push in September 2023 that left Azerbaijan in control of all of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Press Service of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan: Hours before his death, President Raisi with his Azeri counterpart, inaugurating the Giz Galasi hydropower project that straddles the border between Azerbaijan and Iran.

Now that Azerbaijan controls Nagorno-Karabakh, Iran’s water diplomacy has spun to Baku. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei sent his “personal emissary” to the inaugural ceremony of the hydropower plant on May 19 to meet with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev. Khamenei described Azeris as “Iran’s kin,” an elevation of “special relations” to a shared genealogy. Khamenei himself is of Azeri descent, and Azeri-Iranians make up the country’s largest ethnic minority.

Why has Iran switched sides from Armenia to Azerbaijan in the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh? The answer, again, lies in the hydrological wealth of the region.

Nagorno-Karabakh is home to eight major rivers, three of which feed into the Kura River, and five into Aras River (see the map below). The Kura and Aras are the largest bodies of water in all of southern Caucasus. Both rivers merge before their united stream empties into the Caspian Sea. The Aras, which rises in Turkey, supplies Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Iran with their freshwater needs. To harvest this water, the Nagorno-Karabakh region is crisscrossed with four major dams and 33 hydropower plants. Since September 2023, all of this hydrological treasure has come under the sovereign control of Azerbaijan, prompting Iran’s realignment.

Credit: Wikipedia: The Kura-Aras Basin

Giz Galasi, a hydropower project on the Aras River, took heavily sanctioned Iran 18 long years to build. The project sits astride the border between Azerbaijan and Iran, which is why Raisi had invited his Azeri counterpart on the fateful day of May 19 to the inaugural ceremony. For his part, Aliyev extended a personal invitation to Raisi to attend COP29, the climate summit that Baku will host this November. Both presidents considered the completion of the Giz Galasi project an important step toward building renewable reservoirs of energy and water.

Before the project was inaugurated, Raisi repaired his country’s ruptured relations with Azerbaijan. The violent attack on the Azeri embassy in Tehran on January 27, was agreed to be the result of a misunderstanding. Aliyev echoed this position, asserting that “no one could create misunderstanding between two neighbors.” Meanwhile, Azerbaijan announced its intention to build its embassy in the more secure location that Tehran allotted it. In the interim, Baku agreed to reopen its diplomatic mission in the old building. This rapprochement enabled the two leaders to preside over the inaugural ceremony for the Giz Galasi hydropower project.

These renewed relations will now allow Azerbaijan to have access to the Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan, which is entirely located within Armenia and is thus completely inaccessible from mainland Azerbaijan. Baku can access it either through Armenia or Iran. Damaged by the 30-year conflict, Azeri-Armenian relations will take years to mend before such access is even contemplated. That is why Azerbaijan is responsive to Iran’s friendly overtures to have uninterrupted access to its only autonomous republic, where the Giz Galasi hydropower project is located. Iran shares 27 miles of borders with Armenia and Nakhchivan.

Thanks to climate change, southeastern Iran suffers triple-digit summer temperatures and ever hotter and drier weather. Much of southeastern Iran borders Afghanistan and Pakistan. Afghanistan and Iran share a major transboundary waterway, the Helmand River, which rises in the Hindu Kush and traverses hundreds of miles downstream, across Afghanistan, before it drains into Lake Hamoun in Iran. The distribution of Helmand waters is governed by a bilateral water treaty that Afghanistan and Iran signed in 1973, which allows Iran 850 million cubic meters of water in “normal” years. Defining “normal,” however, has always been contentious.

Since the change of government in Kabul in 2021, Iran has been extremely unhappy with its share of the Helmand, which it says has dropped to a trickle. It blames this decline on the massive damming of the river. Raisi expressed his government’s determination “to defend Iran’s water rights” on May 18, 2023, exactly a year before his death. “Mark my words,” he warned  the incumbent rulers of Afghanistan, “we will not allow the rights of our people to be violated in any way.”

This choice of words was out of character for Raisi, who was known for mild manners and soft speech. Here his water diplomacy didn’t stop “at the water’s edge.” Kabul, nonetheless, did heed his words, and attributed the low flow in the river to climate change. Raisi refused to buy this explanation. He demanded  that “Afghanistan’s rulers should allow our experts to come and check the truth of the matter.” Eventually, Iranian experts did visit various sites on the Helmand to determine whether the downstream low flow was due to declining snowmelt and decreasing rainfall. Despite this back and forth, the conflict continues to fester.

The day Raisi died, southeastern Iran was scorching, with temperatures as high as 107 degrees. His plane, meanwhile, was fighting the snowy headwinds of the unseasonal blizzards in the northwest, which eventually brought him down. These climate realities should prompt Washington to rethink its geopolitical priorities in the region. Regional alignments and realignments, especially among Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran, are not so much driven by geopolitics as by very localized material concerns exacerbated by rapid climate change and dwindling water resources.

Yet geopolitical concerns continue to dominate policymaking. For instance, the United States and Europe are wary of the emerging alliance between Azerbaijan and Iran, especially the opening of a route to Nakhchivan through Iran. Also, the United States was quick to condemn the attack on the Azeri embassy in Tehran, reminding Iran of its responsibilities under the Vienna Convention, even as Azerbaijan was already turning the page on the incident. In the Azeri-Armenian conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, Iran and the United States sided with Armenia, but it didn’t make them allies. On the other hand, Israel and Turkey supported Azerbaijan, and yet they continue to be Western allies. This shows the limits to geopolitics, especially when it comes to national interests, climate imperatives, and critical resources such as water. The Iranian president took this lesson to his grave.

 

Tarique Niazi

Tarique Niazi teaches environmental sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire and can be reached via email: niazit@uwec.edu.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

(The Conversation) – In Jordan’s cities, green tanker trucks supplying water are a common sight. The average Jordanian only receives one and a half days of access to piped water per week. When taps run dry, citizens and business owners pick up the phone to order a water delivery to fill their rooftop or basement storage tanks.

These trucks are usually not sent by the local water utility, however. Rather, they are operated by individual vendors who source their water from private wells with a license to sell drinking water or, increasingly, without one. This is the story of the rise of illegal water markets in the Middle East, as the climate crisis leads to more intense and frequent droughts.

When the government struggles to supply enough water

Water delivery via road is increasingly relevant in major cities worldwide. In parts of the world, urban water networks have deteriorated to such a degree that 1 billion people already face frequent public water supply interruptions. This has led to a proliferation of informal water markets. In many water-scarce countries, truck drivers, well owners, or both operate without a license to evade charges and try to obscure their activities. Whether these markets alleviate or exacerbate water stress is a question research has yet to answer.

This is because the nature of illegal markets – they operate covertly – makes it tricky to analyse them. However, our team at the FUSE project has successfully connected models developed by economists and hydrologists to map out illegal water markets in Jordan, the world’s fifth most water-scarce country in the world. To ration its scarce water resources, Jordan introduced scheduled piped water supply interruptions in 1987. Since then, Jordanians have seen the average public water access duration fall from 7 to 1.5 days per week.

Trucked water up to 23 times more expensive

Our study shows tanker trucks play a much greater role in Jordan’s water supply than previously thought. One in every six to seven litres in the country is transported via road. This indicates that Jordan’s cities are already severely affected by extensive water shortages.

We found that more than half of the water that businesses use is currently supplied by tanker trucks, including the majority of the water used by hotels, stores and restaurants.

Tanker water also serves as a critical lifeline for households facing water shortages. Most Jordanians use rooftop storage tanks to bridge scheduled interruptions of tap water. Public water access, however, is unequally distributed. Some neighbourhoods receive just six hours of piped water per week. When storage tanks are depleted or when tap water is interrupted, tanker deliveries are relied upon to fill the gap.

This lifeline is very costly: households pay up to 23 times as much for tanker water as for piped water, and the main reason is the cost of transportation. Tanker trucks drive 29 kilometres on average to buy water from rural wells and deliver it. This makes water delivery via road much more energy-intensive and expensive than piped water provision. We estimate that the transportation alone on average requires 18 kilowatt hours of energy per cubic metre of water sold, or 3 to 6 times as much energy as seawater desalination, itself an energy-intensive process, causing additional carbon emissions.

Most tanker water sold in Jordan is sourced illegally. The map below shows that the amount pumped from Jordan’s aquifers for tanker truck deliveries is 10 times greater than the quantity allowed by well licenses.

Al-Khair Foundation Video: “Millions in the Middle East lack access to clean, safe water.”

The illegal nature of these abstractions can hamper efforts to enforce groundwater conservation rules. Monitoring a large number of widely dispersed wells is difficult, and an interview study conducted in 2015 found evidence of numerous cases of land owners intimidating government employees. This is particularly problematic because Jordan’s groundwater levels are declining rapidly. The total amount of tanker water sold per year is equal to 34% of the groundwater abstracted beyond sustainable yields, exacerbating resource depletion.

Growing dependence

In the future, we expect that the dependence of Jordan’s households and businesses on water deliveries will increase substantially. The country’s population will continue to grow rapidly while its water resources dwindle. Jordan’s unstable regional environment exacerbates water scarcity and impedes promising solution projects, such as the long-held plans to desalinate Red Sea water.

Jordan’s population is projected to double by 2050. Over the same period, the country’s groundwater levels are falling by around 1 metre per year, and its surface water resources are expected to be reduced by 20%. This will make it increasingly difficult for water utilities to provide sufficient water for all.

Consequently, household reliance on water deliveries will increase 2.6-fold by mid-century unless the urban water supply situation is improved. Total water-market sales grow by more than 50%, imposing further pressure on the country’s groundwater resources.

Despite the growing role of water markets, many households risk losing access to tanker water deliveries. Today, nearly all households receiving less than 40 litres per person per day of piped water purchase tanker water. By 2050, we estimate that the price of water deliveries will rise by one third, as groundwater levels decline and transport distances grow. Under this cost increase, only two thirds of water-stressed households will still be able to afford water deliveries.

Safeguarding access

Jordan is currently attempting to regain control over unregulated tanker water pumping by closing illegal wells. This approach has been successful in reducing unlicensed abstractions from irrigation wells. We argue that transferring this policy to tanker wells jeopardises households’ water access as long as equitable and reliable public water access for all is not ensured.

Tanker deliveries are not an ideal solution to Jordanians’ water needs. Providing most water supply to businesses via road causes excessive emissions. Mitigating uncontrolled groundwater abstractions is a sensible policy objective. Closing illegal tanker wells, however, will not reduce unmet urban water demands. Instead, this policy could inadvertently impede household access to an essential water supply source.

As a long-term objective, Jordan should aim to complement investments in water supply augmentation with improvements to its urban water supply networks. This could address urban water shortages and unequal water access as the underlying causes for the emergence of Jordan’s water markets. A recent study of a large-scale investment to improve urban water supply in Jordan has shown, however, that effective enhancements of piped water supply hours are difficult to achieve.

Until equitable and reliable piped water access is ensured, the legalisation of tanker water supply for households may provide a promising path for reducing uncontrolled groundwater abstractions while safeguarding essential water access.

The challenge of deteriorating urban water infrastructure, supply interruptions, and informal or illegal water markets is not unique to Jordan. Lebanon has recently seen a growth in the share of its population relying on tanker water deliveries from 26% to 44%, after its public water supply duration fell from 49 to 22 hours per week. Arid countries around the world face similar issues. By adopting policies that reconcile household access to water deliveries with sustainable groundwater management, Jordan could lead by example.

Christian Klassert, Postdoctoral Researcher in Water Resource Economics, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ and Samer Talozi, Associate professor, Jordan University for Science and Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – Since their inception in the 1940s, the so-called forever chemicals have woven themselves into the fabric of our modern world. But recently, they’ve been appearing in alarming news headlines about their damaging effects on our health.

PFAS have, in fact, come under intense scrutiny due to new research showing their persistent nature in the environment and potential health impacts.

So what are they and are they an issue in the UK and Ireland?

Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) are man-made chemicals, numbering approximately 4,700 variants. What makes them different is their formidable carbon-fluorine (C-F) bonds, renowned among scientists as the mightiest in chemistry.

Image by Baroco Ferison from Pixabay

This stability makes them an important ingredient in many products. PFAS, in various forms, have played pivotal roles in creating oil- and grease-resistant food packaging, non-stick cookware, water- and stain-resistant textiles, and fire-fighting foams, to name a few. Their versatility has propelled them into our daily lives.

The strength of their carbon-fluorine bonds is also what makes them resist breakdown by natural processes. Their longevity, often measured in centuries, has earned them the moniker of “legacy compounds”.

Forever chemicals

Their presence has been detected in worrying concentrations in drinking water, soil, air and even in Arctic ice. Recent scientific investigations have unveiled a concerning connection between PFAS exposure and damage to health, both in humans and animals.

These effects include an increased risk of cancer, liver damage, compromised immune function, developmental disorders and hormonal disruption.

The adverse health effects can be traced to their persistence within the human body. Unlike many substances that are metabolised and eliminated over time, PFAS accumulate in bodily tissues and fluids without breaking down.

This accumulation creates a perpetual, self-sustaining cycle: PFAS contamination permeates rivers, soil and the food chain. These chemicals find their way into the bodies of humans and animals, where they continue to accumulate over time.

The mounting evidence of PFAS-related health risks has triggered global concern. Organisations such as the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants have set their sights on imposing stricter regulations on PFAS use within the European Union.

There is still a lot we don’t know about the long-term health consequences of PFAS exposure, but the increasing global concern is indisputable.

In the UK and Ireland, PFAS contamination infiltrates everyday consumer products and industrial processes. In 2019, the UK Environment Agency’s screening consistently identified PFAS in surface water samples, with PFOA and PFOS found at 96% of the sites they surveyed.

The presence of heightened PFAS concentrations signifies that none of England’s rivers meet the “good chemical” status criteria established by the Water Framework Directive. The Chief Scientist’s Group report identified military and civilian airfields, landfills and wastewater treatment facilities as the likely sources of PFAS contamination.

A pressing issue in Europe and the UK is the absence of standardised regulations regarding these forever chemicals. Only two of the most prevalent PFAS variants, PFOA and PFOS, are currently monitored in the UK.

The Environment Agency’s 2021 report underscored gaps in the environmental monitoring of PFAS in British waters.

These gaps include a lack of toxicology information about how PFAS are released throughout the life cycle of consumer products and drinking water, for instance recycling and waste disposal practices. This makes it difficult to properly assess the risks forever chemicals may pose.

The solution

It’s important to acknowledge that certain PFAS play a crucial role in drug formulations and medical uses.

But the lack of research, testing, and public awareness surrounding these compounds has allowed this issue to persist for too long, mostly due to the useful properties of forever chemicals.

The intricacies associated with PFAS mean we need a holistic approach involving research to discover new chemical compounds that do not harm the environment and human health.

While the solution is complex, it is undoubtedly achievable. We need stringent regulations, more research and a global effort to eliminate PFAS. The pay off is worth it – a safer and healthier future for both our planet and its inhabitants.

Eadaoin Carthy, Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, Dublin City University and Abrar Abdelsalam, Research Assistant in Biomedical Engineering, Dublin City University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ella Nilsen at CNN argued that although state law prohibits the export of Arizona water, using that water to produce crops like alfalfa for cattle back in Saudi Arabia is a stealth way of exporting it.

Gulf oil states are buying or leasing large amounts of agricultural land in the Third World as a hedge against food and water shortages in the future. This policy implies, though, that they will be exporting agricultural goods to themselves even if local people are in danger of starving, the way the British exported crops from Ireland during its Great Famine.

The deal had been done by Republican governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, for reasons best known to him. It functioned as a way for Saudis to use Arizona’s water to raise alfalfa and then to export the crop to Saudi Arabia to feed its cattle. Alfalfa can no longer be grown in Saudi Arabia itself because farmers have depleted the country’s aquifers and the Kingdom receives little rainfall.

The Saudis were getting the water cheaply. As I noted last year, Nick Cleveland-Stout wrote at Responsible Statecraft, “Fondomonte, a subsidiary of Riyadh-based Almarai, has the bargain of a lifetime: for only $25 per acre annually, it can pump as much water as it wants. Nearby farmers pay six times more than the Saudi company. ” Ordinary Arizonan farmers have to pay 6 times that to lease land and get access to aquifers. Cleveland-Stout quoted Holly Irwin, who served on the La Paz County board of supervisors as saying, “We’re not getting oil for free, so why are we giving our water away for free?”

12News says that Governor Hobbs and Attorney-General Mayes have found the Saudi subsidiary, Fondomonte, in breach of its contractual obligations including “a failure to include secondary containment structures on its fuel and Diesel Exhaust Fluid storage units.” Leases of all four Butler Valley fields will be terminated by February of next year.

Hobbs said in a press release, “I’m not afraid to do what my predecessors refused to do—hold people accountable, maximize value for the state land trust, and protect Arizona’s water future. It’s unacceptable that Fondomonte has continued to pump unchecked amounts of groundwater out of our state while in clear default on their lease. I’m proud my administration has taken swift action to hold defaulting high volume water users accountable and bring an end to these leases. And moving forward, I will continue to do everything in my power to protect Arizona’s water so we can continue to sustainably grow for generations to come.”

Attorney General Kris Mayes had run for office partly on a platform of ending the Saudi company’s lease. Of the Ducey administration’s sweetheart deal for Almirai, Mayes told 12News, “I have never seen anything this egregious by state government in my life.”

Saudi Arabia has over 400,000 head of cattle, and is projected to have 443,710 by 2026. It ranks 112th in the world for cattle production. It is in the same range as Malaysia, which is crazy since only 1.6% of its land is arable, whereas Malaysia is lush, with lots of rainfall.

Beef production is highly carbon intensive and needs to be rolled back or done completely differently to forestall even more deadly global heating.

In Saudi Arabia, rainfall is below 150 mm (5.9 inches) per annum in most of the country except for the southwest, where it can reach 400-600 mm (15.7 to 23.6 inches). The Food and Agriculture Organization says that rainfall agriculture is for the most part not possible in places with less than 450 mm (17 inches) of rain a year.

Saudi Arabia also had extensive aquifers, underground water, but these are being rapidly depleted. Attempts in the 1990s to grow wheat by bringing up aquifer water have collapsed as the aquifers got tapped out. These underground lakes of water can take a long time to replenish, even if they aren’t being emptied at a rate of 5 trillion gallons a year, as they were in unregulated Saudi Arabia.

Cows are a water-intensive animal, which is why in most of the Arid Zone stretching from Morocco to the Gobi desert in China, people prefer lamb and goat meat (and sometimes camel), since those animals can be raised in semi-arid conditions, that is, they can be herded to where pasturage pops up from snow melt or sudden squalls, on land that is often otherwise just savanna. Dairy cows, in contrast, can drink 30–50 gallons of water per day. Sheep can get along with half a gallon but depending on other factors could drink 5 gallons a day.

Starting from on the excellent reporting of Ella Nilsen at CNN, I blogged this issue last November, writing:

Since Saudi water resources are insufficient to raise the alfalfa needed to feed these cows, the Saudi firm Almarai established an American subsidiary, Fondomonte, which has leased land in Arizona to grow this feed crop. The alternative would be to import beef and milk from someplace where producing them makes sense (i.e. neither Saudi Arabia nor Arizona).

The hitch, though is that much of Arizona, especially the southwest, gets only 4 inches of rain a year and isn’t much better than Saudi Arabia. Farming depends heavily on irrigating off rivers or using underground aquifer water. As for the Colorado River, it is at historic low levels.

Aquifers can be replenished by rainfall, but given the great Southwest Megadrought that began around the year 2000, many of them are having their water pumped out and not replaced. In some areas of the state, people could dig down 100 feet and hit water. Now, the water table is more like 500 feet, Nilsen says. And the aquifers had been in danger of being emptied out entirely if the state had failed to act.

Now the whole project of Americans trying to do intensive agriculture in Arizona needs to be rethought. It is one of the crazier ideas the US government ever had. Not quite as crazy, though, as essentially giving away Arizona’s scarce water supplies to Saudi Arabia.

( Middle East Monitor ) – One of the most pressing issues of the 21st century is the management and allocation of the limited freshwater resources in the world. Since an important number of those water resources are trans-boundary, crossing the political boundaries of more than one nation, the complexity of the problem has increased over the years. In dealing with trans-boundary water disputes, riparian states such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Sudan mostly prefer water diplomacy mechanisms that involve the processes and institutions through which the national interests and identities of sovereign states are represented to one another.

States’ claim of sovereignty

On the one hand, states have been the main actors in shaping trans-boundary water policies and conducting water diplomacy throughout the last few decades of water disputes. On the other hand, international organisations, international non-governmental organisations and science-policy initiatives joined the water diplomacy processes as new actors, with the coming of issues of scarcity, pollution and the sharing of water resources in order to take the attention of the international community. With the participation of these actors in water diplomacy, new approaches related to the management of trans-boundary water resources, for example, the sharing of benefits such as energy, food and services to be obtained from water resources instead of sharing water resources per se, have been developed.

With the increase in the use of trans-boundary rivers for consumption purposes, such as the expansion of irrigation since the last quarter of the 19th century, many states have claimed mutual sovereignty and rights of use over trans-boundary water resources. As a result of these discourses and actions, a series of international customary law principles have been adopted. The riparian states of trans-boundary waters have signed numerous bilateral and multilateral agreements, protocols and memoranda of understanding on the use, management and sharing of these resources. In other words, treaty (written) and customary (unwritten) international water principles of law, as well as traditional diplomatic methods, have been developed by the states as the main tools for resolving disputes regarding trans-boundary waters.

Trans-boundary water disputes in Middle East

The Middle East is regarded as one of the most challenged regions in terms of trans-boundary surface and groundwater resources management and allocation between two or more countries. In addition to the constraints of natural water resources, the region suffers from an abundance of issues that compound water security, including a rapidly growing and displaced population, uneven economic development, limited amount of water supply that is irregularly distributed, the negative impacts of climate change and variability and poor water management and allocation practices both within and between states. Some 60 per cent of the water in the region flows across international borders, complicating resource management. The geopolitical importance of the region and the conflicts that arise have consequently resulted in aggravating the usual problems of using water in a variety of settings in the Nile or Euphrates-Tigris river basins.

Nile River dispute

The Nile basin is considered one of the world’s hydro-political hotspots, and much has been debated in academic and policy circles about the likelihood of interstate conflict between the Nile countries. In the late 1920s, colonial water-sharing agreements were concluded in the Nile basin under the full control of Great Britain. Following the wave of independence in Africa in the 1950s, all upstream riparians declared void those agreements, including the most important one, namely the 1929 Nile Water Agreement, which was later replaced by the still legally binding 1959 Agreement for the Full Utilisation of the Nile Waters, under which the two riparians agreed to share the waters in proportions of 75 per cent and 25 per cent for Egypt and 25 per cent for Sudan, respectively. The 1959 agreement has never been accepted by any of the upstream riparians, causing recurring tensions and disputes over water. Moreover, tensions in the Nile basin waters were often raised by political rhetoric, particularly between the Egyptian and Ethiopian leadership. Egypt, so heavily dependent on the Nile waters, has used its military might and hegemonic status to warn the upper riparians, primarily Ethiopia, not to undertake any projects that would risk Egypt’s share of the Nile.

Article continues after bonus IC video
Al Jazeera English: “Will Ethiopia compromise on its Grand Renaissance Dam? | Inside Story

Challenging this historical status quo, in March 2011, the Ethiopian government announced plans to construct a hydroelectric dam on the Blue Nile, namely the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), which is planned to generate 6,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity, becoming Africa’s largest power plant. Concerns have been raised over the dam’s impact on Egypt. Tensions over the dam increased in May 2011, when Ethiopia temporarily diverted the flow of the Blue Nile as part of the construction process.

After exchanges of harsh rhetoric between the heads of state, the foreign ministers of Egypt and Ethiopia met and agreed to hold further talks on the construction of the dam. Hence, the water dispute in the Nile basin was intimately related to unfair clauses in the historical bilateral sharing agreements. Additionally, the increasing ability and desire of the upstream states, namely Ethiopia, to challenge Egypt’s status as a hydro-hegemon and the overall status quo constitute contemporary reasons for tensions over water. The Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) was established in 1999 to find sustainable technical, institutional, legal and political solutions to the hydro-political challenges centred on a river embedded in regional geopolitical complexity.

Tigris-Euphrates basin

Trans-boundary water issues started to be a part of regional politics when the three major riparian states, namely Turkiye, Syria and Iraq, introduced major water and land resource development projects in the Tigris-Euphrates basin. In this context, large-scale dams and irrigation systems were initiated in the early 1960s. Owing to the competitive nature of these uncoordinated national water development projects, disagreements over trans-boundary water uses surfaced, and the riparian states opted for diplomatic negotiations to deal with their disagreements. As the national water development projects progressed, incompatibilities between water supply and demand occurred throughout the river basin. Even though no hot conflict was reported among the riparian states concerning water sharing, the sporadic technical negotiations could not prepare the ground for a comprehensive treaty on equitable and effective trans-boundary water management in the basin.

In the Tigris-Euphrates basin, the riparian states preferred water diplomacy mechanisms, namely diplomatic negotiations, to resolve the crises. Most of the crises were related to Iraq’s concerns regarding the impact of the construction and filling of the dams in Turkiye and Syria. Thus, diplomats and technocrats from the 3 countries met several times, although on an irregular basis, to exchange information concerning the technical details of the construction and the filling of the dams. In the period between the 1960s and the 1990s, the riparian states were too rigid in their position, emphasizing their absolute water rights over the rivers. With the emergence of a conducive overall political environment in the early 2000s, state representatives adopted a more needs-based approach by concluding a series of memoranda of understanding on the protection of the environment, water quality management, water efficiency, drought management and flood protection, with a view to addressing the adverse effects of climate change.

On the other hand, in the early 1980s, the riparian states in the Tigris-Euphrates basin managed to establish the institutional framework of the Joint Technical Committee (JTC), whose members included participants from all three riparian states. However, the riparian states did not agree to give the JTC clear and commonly agreed-upon functions. On the contrary, the states continued unilateral and uncoordinated water and land development projects, and the JTC meetings did not make an effective contribution to the settlement of the trans-boundary water dispute. It also did not provide a platform for delineating the priorities and needs of the co-riparians as a basis for addressing regional water problems.

Water diplomacy mechanisms, particularly at the trans-boundary level, have been introduced in the Tigris-Euphrates basin with the aim of reaching agreeable solutions between parties that have diverging interests as well as competing water development schemes. With the help of formal institutions like the JTC, high-level water diplomacy frameworks, water-sharing protocols and memoranda of understanding, the national interests and identities of sovereign states are represented to one another. Although these institutions may not have been effective most of the time in terms of the protection and efficient use and management of water and other related resources, they served to place trans-boundary water issues within a legitimate and peaceful realm, rather than mixing them with potentially conflict-laden issues, such as border security and territorial disputes, which might otherwise escalate into hot confrontations. However, there still does not exist a multilateral treaty regime involving all of the stakeholders concerned, including civil society organisations and private companies in energy, agriculture and the environment, as well as relevant development-related sectors, for the effective and equitable use and management of trans-boundary waters in the basin.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Egypt and Ethiopia have waged a diplomatic war of words over Ethiopia’s massive new dam – the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam – on the Blue Nile, which started filling up in July 2020. The political row has threatened to get out of hand on occasion but now the two countries have finally agreed to conclude “a mutually acceptable agreement” within four months. We asked John Mukum Mbaku, the author of a recent article on the Ethiopian dam and a co-author of a book on the Nile River’s changing legal regime, to answer four key questions.

What is the context of the current tussle?

Ethiopia, whose highlands provide more than 85% of the water that flows into the Nile, has long argued that it has the right under international law to manage resources within its own borders for its national development. It sees the “Nile as a gift of God” given to Ethiopians to use for their development.

Egypt, which depends on the Nile for more than 90% of its fresh water, has argued that the Ethiopian dam represents a threat to its water security and its very existence as a people.

The decision by Addis Ababa to begin construction of the dam on the Blue Nile in 2011 exacerbated an already deteriorating relationship between Ethiopia and its two downstream neighbours, Egypt and Sudan, over access to Nile waters. After Egypt’s diplomatic efforts failed to stop construction, Cairo redirected its energies to securing a legally binding agreement for filling and operating the dam.

But no mutually acceptable agreement for filling and operating the dam was ever reached.

In August 2020, Addis Ababa began to fill the dam’s reservoir. That process was repeated in 2021 and 2022.

In 2023, Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed announced that the country would delay the fourth filling until September “to alleviate the concerns of neighbouring people”.

The dam’s reservoir filling in particular, and its operation in general, are issues that the three countries must resolve, most likely through a legally binding agreement or treaty.

In February 2022, the Ethiopian dam started producing electricity. Egyptians claimed that Addis Ababa was “violating its obligations under the 2015 Declaration of Principles” and endangering Egyptian “water interests”.

What are the main sticking points going into the talks?

An agreement would have to explicitly deal with issues that are important to Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan. The most important are Egypt’s and Sudan’s historically acquired rights to Nile waters. The rights were granted by the 1929 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty and the 1959 bilateral agreement between Egypt and Sudan (1959 Nile Treaty).

After estimating the average annual flow of the Nile River as measured at Aswan to be 84 billion cubic metres, the two treaties granted 66% of Nile waters to Egypt, 22% to Sudan and 12% to account for seepage and evaporation. These allocations exhausted all the Nile’s average annual flow of water. Egypt was also granted veto power over all construction projects on the Nile and its tributaries.

These rights came to be known as Egypt’s and Sudan’s acquired rights. They have been the main sticking point in efforts to conclude a treaty between all 11 Nile riparian states for the allocation of the waters of the Nile, as well as between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan over the Ethiopian dam.

While Ethiopia and other upstream riparian states see these two treaties as colonial anachronisms that have no relevance to modern Nile governance, Egypt and Sudan insist that they are binding.

What impact would a breakthrough have on other Nile Basin agreements?

The impact will depend on what type of agreement is reached. Assume that both Egypt and Sudan agree to abandon the rights granted by the 1929 and 1959 treaties. They could then enter into negotiation with Ethiopia to produce a new treaty that creates rights for all three states.

Such a treaty could provide the impetus for all 11 Nile Basin states to return to the Cooperative Framework Agreement, which was expected to provide a legal framework for governing the Nile based on equitable and reasonable water use. The framework agreement has been in limbo since Egypt and Sudan rejected it.

The other Nile Basin states see these colonial-era treaties as a violation of international law principles, and a breach of the vision of the Nile Basin Initiative.

What other claims threaten the status quo?

Egypt fears that if Addis Ababa is allowed to fill the reservoir without a legally binding agreement, other Nile Basin states might also take unilateral actions. This could harm Egypt’s water security and ability to control projects on the Nile River and its tributaries.

Then, there is the matter of how to manage issues related to climate change, such as droughts and floods. The existence of the dam means Addis Ababa’s cooperation will be required. In times of drought, for example, the Ethiopian dam will be expected to release some water to help Egypt and Sudan.

Ethiopia’s right to water for agriculture and household consumption is an issue that has not yet been agreed upon by all three countries.

Egypt and Sudan are worried about the harm that could come to them from activities upstream. Egypt remains adamant that the dam will hurt its water supply and threaten domestic development.

But Sudanese officials appear to have changed their assessment of the impact of the dam. They now see it as a potential regulator of seasonal floods and provider of clean energy.

These issues should be examined thoroughly during the negotiations. The three countries should adopt a treaty or agreement that is mutually acceptable and beneficial.

Over the years, the three countries have struggled to bring meaning to terms like “significant harm” and “equitable and reasonable utilisation”. The final treaty should define these terms. It should also create a mediation mechanism, which can include referring certain specified matters to the International Court of Justice for resolution.

John Mukum Mbaku, Professor, Weber State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Juan: In your devastating post about Iraq’s drought, you could have given more attention to the crucial role of Turkey in flouting international law and damaging Iraq (and Syria) through its illegal capture of the bulk of the water of first the Euphrates and then the Tigris, building very large dams and hundreds of smaller water diversion devices on both rivers.

You might also have mentioned the dams that Iran has built on feeders to the Tigris, especially as they affect the Shatt al-Arab. The building of the Tabqa dam, the Tishrin dam, and other smaller dams in Syria also affected the water supply of Iraq. In the case of the Tabqa Dam, I witnessed personally the kind of disruption such an upstream dam could cause.

In 1974, as Syria began to fill that reservoir (Lake Assad), the water coming down the Euphrates to Iraq was greatly reduced. The Iraqi government made decisions about allocation of the remaining water and, as a result, the Dagharah/Afaq canal, that runs past Nippur (where I was digging at the time), received water only twice a week. This meant that the local farmers did not have enough water to plant and harvest grain, but did have enough for vegetable patches. A local man, who worked for us in the dig house, began to look exhausted and I found out that he was getting up in the middle of the night on those two days to go out and irrigate his fields. He knew that the Syrian dam was causing the problem. I asked him once what would happen if there continued to be tension between Iraq and Syria. He answered: “One will eat the other.”

Image of Euphrates, Iraq by David Mark from Pixabay

Farther south along the canal, the town of Afaq was allotted enough water to survive, but the area farther downstream was not. As a result, 20,000 people (mostly farmers and their families) along that canal were removed and resettled in the rain-fed area north of Baghdad. A couple of years later, when more normal water allocations were resumed, most of the people returned. With the flood of money that resulted from the nationalization of oil, the government took off of the Development Board’s shelves ambitious irrigation plans that had been developed in the 1940s and 50s, based in part on Willcocks’ grand scheme that he created for the Ottomans. To gain some security in water to offset the dams upstream, the Iraqis built dams at Haditha on the Euphrates and at Eski Mosul on the Tigris, and began but did not finish another at the Fatha Gorge.

For the south, the government revived a desalinization project that was designed to flush the salt out of fields and drain the brine into the Third River, which would dump it into a newly created marsh south of Ur and/or into the Gulf. This huge project, designed by an American company and implemented by a Dutch company, was not finished because of the 1958 revolution. When the project was revived in the 1970s, it made great headway, including the cutting of the Third River, but was halted by the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980. Most important, the key project for the entire country DID see completion–it was meant to offset a situation such as had happened with the filling of the Tabqa. The project connected the Tigris and Euphrates through a deep canal and siphon system just north of Baghdad, making it possible to shift Euphrates water to the Tigris and Tigris water to the Euphrates, as needed.

There was one unfortunate result of this linkage in that, although relief for short-term water crises was assured, there were several years in which too much water was made available and often the canals, including those near Afaq, were running at peak much of the time, allowing farmers to over-irrigate. This resulted in a drastic rise in groundwater, leading to increased salinization of fields. During that period, the marshes grew in size. Gradually, chemicals from agriculture and industry led to increasingly polluted water in Iraq.

By the 1980s, people in the marshes began to say that they tended not to wade in the water because exposure to the water resulted in skin rashes. They noted that fish, frogs, and other animals were showing odd lesions. And they began to witness the diminution of the marshes, as more and more of the water was drawn off and evaporated upstream. In 1988, my last trip to the marshes, the tourist village of Chibayish, where we used to get into boats to see the marshes, was five kilometers from the water.

This had nothing to do with any move by Saddam to drain the marshes, but was just the result of all the extraction upstream, primarily in Turkey. Northern Iraq has had a history of occasional long periods of drought, but the south never had uniform droughts until recently because enough water would come down the rivers to support irrigation, even if reduced.

We know that there were historical periods in which parts of the irrigated zone in the south were abandoned, but other areas still flourished. One of the easily foreseeable results of our current crisis of global warming is the effect of the reduction of snow in the Zagros, which will create massive desertification; we are seeing early effects in the entire system of both rivers, even in Turkey. But the coming disruption in the Tigris-Euphrates basin will appear to be moderate compared to the situation for the billions of people in the countries dependent on the Himalayas.

Mac