1. Introduction
The water situation in Jordan is complex and unsustainable. Jordan experiences growing freshwater demands that already exceed availability and surface and groundwater resources are polluted [
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7]. At the same time, Jordan heavily relies on water resources outside its borders, in the physical sense through the sharing of rivers and aquifers with neighboring countries as well as indirectly through Jordan’s strong dependence on virtual water imports [
8]. Sharing water resources with Israel and Syria has led to tensions in the past [
9,
10,
11,
12]. On top of this, Jordan has experienced large influxes of refugees as a result of the ongoing conflicts in the surrounding countries [
12,
13], which increases Jordan’s struggle to meet domestic water needs [
1,
2,
4,
5,
6,
14,
15].
Jordan is partly arid and partly semi-arid [
5,
6,
16,
17] and therefore has naturally low water availability. Climate change has caused a decline in precipitation and hence surface water flows [
4,
6]. Based on model simulations for different climate change scenarios, Abdulla
et al. [
18] found that decreases in precipitation will lead to significant decreases in runoff and groundwater recharge in the Zarqa river basin (
Figure 1). The percentage of time that the Jordan River basin and its surroundings will experience moderate, severe, and extreme drought conditions is expected to increase in the future [
16]. Such droughts can have devastating effects when the agricultural and water management practices in place are unsustainable [
19]. Furthermore, the (semi-)arid conditions in the Jordan Valley, characterized by a combination of high potential evapotranspiration and low precipitation, causes a lack of salt flushing and leaching of agricultural soils, leading to alarming soil salinity levels [
20].
Naturally low water availability in Jordan is reduced further by (over)consumption of shared surface water resources by upstream and neighboring countries. Both the Jordan River and the Yarmouk River have been depleted by upstream (over)consumption in Israel and Syria [
2,
4,
6,
21]. The sharing of trans-boundary water resources has led to difficulties and tensions. In 1994, Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty that included agreements on water allocations [
22]. Jordan is allowed a certain outflow from Lake Tiberius (situated in Israel) into the Lower Jordan River. The current national water strategy of Jordan assumes 50 × 10
6 m³/year of water to be secured by the peace treaty [
23]. When in 1999 the region was struck by a drought event, the agreed water allocation was threatened and bilateral talks temporarily broke down before the two parties found a resolution in the end [
9,
10]. With minimal outflow from Lake Tiberius controlled by Israel, the Lower Jordan River mainly depends on inflow from its main tributary, the Yarmouk River [
3]. The Yarmouk River is shared by Jordan, Syria, and Israel [
24]. Jordan and Syria signed an agreement on sharing the Yarmouk’s water in 1987 [
11,
24]. Nevertheless, the countries have had continued tensions over the construction and operation of Syrian dams on the river [
12]. In 2012,
The Jordan Times [
11] reported that Syria violated the agreement, thereby depriving Jordan of its legitimate water share.
Current water demand in Jordan exceeds the limited renewable water resources available in the country. Agricultural water demand is growing (by 38% in the period 2000–2010 [
4]) despite efforts to improve irrigation efficiency and encouraging farmers to grow less water-intensive crops [
1]. Domestic water demand is unmet and still increasing (by 40%–46% in the period 2000–2010 [
4,
6]). This increase is due to rapid population growth, caused by a high rate of natural population growth and periodic massive influxes of refugees [
1,
2,
5,
6,
15]. In 2014, the refugee population in Jordan, mostly consisting of Syrians, was around 10% of the country’s total population (
Figure 2). These are officially registered refugees only and the actual number is likely to be higher. Since the conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Israel/Palestine are ongoing, there is every reason to believe that the number of people seeking refuge in Jordan is growing.
Overconsumption of Jordan’s surface and groundwater resources is associated with several environmental impacts. Due to the high amount of abstractions along its course, the Jordan River has shrunk to a small creek by the time it reaches the Dead Sea, with current discharge being less than 5% of historical levels [
6,
7]. This has led to an alarming decline of the Dead Sea level, which in turn causes lowering of groundwater tables in adjacent aquifers [
4]. Since the 1970s, the water level of the Dead Sea has dropped at a rate of about 1 meter per year [
25,
26]. With each meter of reduction, 300 × 10
6 m³ of fresh water is lost from neighboring aquifers [
25]. Groundwater levels are rapidly dropping throughout the country [
1,
2,
5]. This has led to the drying up of springs and disappearance of the Azraq wetlands [
3], with reduced habitat for endemic species and migratory birds as a consequence [
1].
Problems of surface and groundwater pollution are widespread in Jordan, which aggravates water scarcity [
27]. Inadequate treatment of industrial and domestic wastewater and over- and misuse of fertilizers and pesticides pollute these resources [
1,
6,
28]. The canals that distribute water throughout Jordan are more and more polluted by salts and other agricultural runoff [
4]. Pollution of groundwater is exacerbated by overpumping, which leads to a concentration of salts and other pollutants [
1,
17,
29,
30,
31,
32]. Hotspots of groundwater pollution in the regions of Amman, Zarqa, and Balqa have been mapped by Alqadi
et al. [
33]. The pollution of water in Jordan is also partially a trans-boundary issue. The Jordan River Basin suffers from agricultural runoff and untreated wastewater from all riparian countries [
1].
Jordan thus faces great internal water scarcity and pollution, conflict over trans-boundary waters, and strong dependency on external water resources through trade. Given the great variety of challenges, sustainable water management in Jordan is a challenging task, which thus far has not succeeded. The objective of this paper is to analyze Jordan’s domestic water scarcity and pollution and the country’s external water dependency, and subsequently review options to reduce the risk of extreme water scarcity and dependency. In the next section we discuss methods and data. In the third section we analyze the water situation in Jordan from a water footprint perspective, with the aim of accurately quantifying the severity of water scarcity and pollution in Jordan. In the fourth section, we analyze the country’s dependency on external water resources by quantifying and mapping the world-wide water consumption associated with the products and commodities Jordanians consume. In the fifth section, we review possible responses to Jordan’s water problems and external water dependency.
Figure 1.
Map of Jordan with surface water basins and rainfall isohyets. Source: [
34].
Figure 1.
Map of Jordan with surface water basins and rainfall isohyets. Source: [
34].
Figure 2.
Refugees and asylum seekers in Jordan. Data: total population from [
35]; refugee and asylum seekers population from [
36].
Figure 2.
Refugees and asylum seekers in Jordan. Data: total population from [
35]; refugee and asylum seekers population from [
36].
2. Methods and Data
We estimate water footprints of production and consumption and virtual water trade following the global standard for Water Footprint Assessment [
37]. We quantify the water footprint (WF) of five different sectors in Jordan: crop production, grazing, animal water supply, industrial production, and domestic water supply. Therein we distinguish three different WFs: green, blue, and gray. The green WF refers to the appropriation of the green water flow (
i.e., evapotranspiration of precipitation stored in the soil moisture and on top of vegetation) in crop production and grazing systems. The blue WF expresses the consumptive use of surface and groundwater (blue water resources), which excludes return flows to these resources. The gray WF expresses water pollution in the same unit as water consumption. It measures the volume of freshwater required to dilute the pollutants that enter blue water resources to such an extent that ambient water quality standards are not violated.
We estimate the WF of crops in Jordan for the period 1996–2005 following the method of and using the same underlying datasets as Mekonnen and Hoekstra [
38]. The gray WF of crop production is calculated based on leaching of nitrogen to the groundwater, assuming an ambient water quality standard of 10 mg/L of nitrate–nitrogen (NO
3–N). The WF of grazing and the domestic and industrial sectors as well as imported and exported virtual water volumes are estimated following the methods of Hoekstra and Mekonnen [
8]. The gray WFs of the industrial and domestic sectors relate to the aggregate of pollutants, but are conservative estimates since we take the part of the return flow which is disposed into the environment without prior treatment as a measure of the gray WF (thus assuming a dilution factor of 1), following Hoekstra and Mekonnen [
8].
The WF of Jordan’s consumption, defined as the volume of water consumed to produce all the products consumed by the Jordanian population, inside and outside Jordan, is calculated following Hoekstra and Mekonnen [
8]. The national water saving through trade is the volume of water that Jordan saved by importing products instead of producing them domestically, and is calculated following Mekonnen and Hoekstra [
39].
The total blue WF of each sector is split into a part originating from surface water (
i.e., blue surface-WF) and a part originating from groundwater (
i.e., blue ground-WF). This was done according to the origin of blue water use per sector (groundwater
versus surface water) which we obtained from Alqadi and Kumar [
4]. We scaled the estimated ground-WFs of industries and households to equal water withdrawals based on the consumptive use fraction following Schyns and Hoekstra [
40]. The underlying assumption is that none of the water abstracted from groundwater for industrial production and domestic water supply returns (clean) to the groundwater in the same period of time.
Blue water scarcity is calculated as the ratio of the total blue WF in Jordan over total blue water availability [
37]. Total blue water availability is defined as the total renewable surface and groundwater resources, as defined by the FAO [
41]. We assess blue water scarcity for the sum of surface and groundwater, but also for groundwater separately. Jordan’s renewable surface water resources are estimated by taking the sum of treaty allocations and surface run-off produced internally. Groundwater availability is defined as the groundwater recharge minus the fraction of natural groundwater outflow required to sustain environmental flow requirements in the river [
37]. In practice, groundwater availability in Jordan is often reported as the “safe yield” of groundwater without further clarification [
2,
6,
23,
30,
42]. The FAO [
41] defines “safe yield” as the amount of water (in general, the long-term average amount) that can be withdrawn from the groundwater without causing undesirable results. Although it is a vague concept [
43,
44], we take reported figures on safe yield [
2,
6,
23,
30,
42] as a proxy for groundwater availability, due to lack of data. We consider Jordan’s blue water availability around the year 2000 as proper context for the WF estimates that relate to the period 1996–2005. We use the water scarcity classification by Schyns and Hoekstra [
40], which is derived from that of Hoekstra
et al. [
45] but compensated for the fact that environmental flow requirements are not considered by using stricter threshold values for the different scarcity levels. A blue water scarcity level beyond 0.4 is classified as severe water scarcity and indicates that the blue WF exceeds 40% of the maximum sustainable blue WF. Levels in the ranges 0.3–0.4, 0.2–0.3, and <0.2 are classified as significant, moderate, and low blue water scarcity, respectively.
The water pollution level is calculated as the ratio of the actual to the maximum sustainable gray WF [
37]. The maximum sustainable gray WF, an indicator of the assimilation capacity for water pollution, equals the actual runoff, which is estimated as natural runoff minus the blue water consumed. The water pollution level thus measures the degree to which the waste assimilation capacity of blue water resources has been consumed. A water pollution level above 100% means that the gray WF exceeds the sustainable level, thus ambient water quality standards are violated.
Finally, we review the sustainability of proposed solutions to Jordan’s domestic water problems and external water dependency in literature, while involving the results from the analysis in this paper. We categorize the response options into five categories, which we use to position current water policy in Jordan. These categories are: (1) increasing water availability; (2) reducing water demand per unit of product; (3) reducing water demand by changing production and consumption patterns; (4) reducing risks related to the external water dependency; and (5) international assistance in taking in refugees.
4. Jordan’s Dependency on Foreign Water Resources
With respect to trans-boundary water resources, total treaty allocations to Jordan (from the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers and various springs) around the year 2000 sum up to 220 × 10
6 m³/year [
6]. Comparing this with renewable blue water availability in Jordan around that time (650 × 10
6 m³/year), we find that the ratio of external to total water resources of Jordan is 34%. In other words, Jordan is dependent on upstream and neighboring countries for one-third of its annual renewable water resources.
Jordan’s virtual water import dependency is even larger. Of all the water consumption associated with the production of the products and commodities Jordanians consume, 86% takes place outside Jordan’s borders and is spread all over the world (
Figure 3). The total WF of Jordan’s consumption in the period 1996–2005 is estimated at 8316 × 10
6 m³/year, of which 6712 × 10
6 m³/year is virtual water import (
Table 5). With virtual water import being more than six times larger than virtual water export (
Table 2), Jordan is a large net virtual water importer. Jordan obtained a national water savings of 7113 × 10
6 m³/year through trade in the period 1996–2005. This is the volume of water that would have been required had Jordan produced all imported commodities itself.
Figure 3.
The global water footprint of Jordan’s consumption (
a) and an enlarged view of the Middle East (
b). Both follow the legend depicted in (
b). Period: 1996–2005. Data based on [
8].
Figure 3.
The global water footprint of Jordan’s consumption (
a) and an enlarged view of the Middle East (
b). Both follow the legend depicted in (
b). Period: 1996–2005. Data based on [
8].
The largest volumes of imported virtual water in the study period are associated with import of: wheat from the USA; barley from Syria and Iraq; maize, soybeans, and wheat from Argentina; animal products and soybeans from India; oil palm from Malaysia and Indonesia; and cotton from China (
Table 6). However, it should be noted that the import pattern has changed since then. Data from FAO [
47] shows that since 2004/2005 barley imports from Syria and Iraq have ceased and instead have mainly come from Ukraine, Germany, Russia, and, more recently, Romania. Also since 2004/2005, Jordan mainly imports wheat from Russia, Ukraine, and Syria, with only relatively small amounts from USA and practically zero from Argentina [
47]. Nevertheless, Jordan’s dependency on virtual water imports remains evident.
Table 5.
Jordan’s virtual water import (VWI) by major product (10
6 m³/year). Period: 1996–2005. Data based on [
8].
Table 5.
Jordan’s virtual water import (VWI) by major product (106 m³/year). Period: 1996–2005. Data based on [8].
Product | Green VWI | Blue VWI | Gray VWI | Total VWI | % of total |
---|
Barley | 1067 | 217 | 155 | 1439 | 21% |
Wheat | 937 | 63 | 102 | 1102 | 16% |
Animal products | 524 | 66 | 17 | 607 | 9% |
Oil palm fruit | 524 | 0 | 28 | 551 | 8% |
Cotton | 221 | 169 | 107 | 497 | 7% |
Soybeans | 454 | 14 | 9 | 477 | 7% |
Maize | 367 | 20 | 57 | 444 | 7% |
Sugar cane | 212 | 70 | 17 | 300 | 4% |
Other crops | 626 | 259 | 67 | 952 | 14% |
Industrial products | 0 | 23 | 319 | 342 | 5% |
Total import | 4933 | 902 | 878 | 6712 | 100% |
Table 6.
Jordan’s virtual water import (VWI) per major trade partner (10
6 m³/year). Period: 1996–2005. Data based on [
8].
Table 6.
Jordan’s virtual water import (VWI) per major trade partner (106 m³/year). Period: 1996–2005. Data based on [8].
Country | Green VWI | Blue VWI | Gray VWI | Total VWI | Major Products |
---|
USA | 697 | 88 | 123 | 908 | Wheat–66%, maize–16%, rice–8% |
Syria | 626 | 92 | 122 | 840 | Barley–78%, animal products–4% |
Argentina | 641 | 11 | 31 | 683 | Wheat–25%, maize–38%, soybean–35% |
India | 434 | 35 | 29 | 498 | Animal products–40%, soybean–34%, coffee–7%, wheat–6%, cotton–4% |
Iraq | 172 | 222 | 156 | 550 | Barley–69%, industrial products–29% |
Malaysia | 319 | 0.5 | 14 | 333 | Oil palm–97% |
Indonesia | 238 | 0.1 | 17 | 255 | Oil palm–88% |
China | 133 | 22 | 83 | 239 | Cotton–71%, industrial products–14%, animal products–6% |
Turkey | 172 | 21 | 25 | 218 | Wheat–41%, barley–29%, cheakpeas–13%, cotton–7% |
Ukraine | 173 | 4 | 30 | 208 | Barley–60%, sunflower seed–16%, industrial products–14%, wheat–9%, |
Australia | 93 | 41 | 3 | 138 | Animal products–53%, rice–32%, barley–12% |
The largest component in the total WF of the average Jordanian consumer relates to the consumption of animal products such as meat, hides and skins, and milk (
Figure 4). This WF is largely located outside Jordan. For example, imports of animal products associated with large WFs came from India and Australia. Higher standards of living in Jordan [
48] are likely associated with an increased share of animal products in the average diet and hence an increased WF of consumption.
Figure 4.
The average water footprint of a consumer in Jordan. Period: 1996–2005. Data based on [
8].
Figure 4.
The average water footprint of a consumer in Jordan. Period: 1996–2005. Data based on [
8].