An amount of freshwater almost the size of the Dead Sea has been lost in
parts of the Middle East due to poor management, increased demands for
groundwater and the effects of a 2007 drought, according to a NASA
study.
The study, to be published Friday in Water Resources Research, a journal
of the American Geophysical Union, examined data over seven years from
2003 from a pair of gravity-measuring satellites which is part of NASA's
Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment or GRACE. Researchers found
freshwater reserves in parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the
Tigris and Euphrates river basins had lost 117 million acre feet (144
cubic kilometers) of its total stored freshwater, the second fastest
loss of groundwater storage loss after India.
About 60 percent of the loss resulted from pumping underground
reservoirs for ground water, including 1,000 wells in Iraq, and another
fifth was due to impacts of the drought including declining snow packs
and soil drying up. Loss of surface water from lakes and reservoirs
accounted for about another fifth of the decline, the study found.
"This rate of water loss is among the largest liquid freshwater losses
on the continents," the authors wrote in the study, noting the declines
were most obvious after a drought.
The study is the latest evidence of a worsening water crisis in the
Middle East, where demands from growing populations, war and the
worsening effects of climate change are raising the prospect that some
countries could face sever water shortages in the decades to come. Some
like impoverished Yemen blame their water woes on the semi-arid
conditions and the grinding poverty while the oil-rich Gulf faces water
shortages mostly due to the economic boom that has created glistening
cities out of the desert.
In a report released during the U.N. climate talks in Qatar, the World
Bank concluded among the most critical problems in the Middle East and
North Africa will be worsening water shortages. The region already has
the lowest amount of freshwater in the world. With climate change,
droughts in the region are expected to turn more extreme, water runoff
is expected to decline 10 percent by 2050 while demand for water is
expected to increase 60 percent by 2045.
One of the biggest challenges to improving water conservation is often
competing demands which has worsened the problem in the Tigris and
Euphrates river basins.
Turkey controls the Tigris and Euphrates headwaters, as well as the
reservoirs and infrastructure of Turkey's Greater Anatolia Project,
which dictates how much water flows downstream into Syria and Iraq, the
researchers said. With no coordinated water management between the three
countries, tensions have intensified since the 2007 drought because
Turkey continues to divert water to irrigate farmland.
"That decline in stream flow put a lot of pressure on northern Iraq,"
Kate Voss, lead author of the study and a water policy fellow with the
University of California's Center for Hydrological Modeling in Irvine,
said. "Both the UN and anecdotal reports from area residents note that
once stream flow declined, this northern region of Iraq had to switch to
groundwater. In an already fragile social, economic and political
environment, this did not help the situation."
Jay Famiglietti, principle investigator of the new study and a
hydrologist and UC Irvine professor of Earth System Science, plans to
visit the region later this month, along with Voss and two other UC
Irvine colleagues, to discuss their findings and raise awareness of the
problem and the need for a regional approach to solve the problem.
"They just do not have that much water to begin with, and they're in a
part of the world that will be experiencing less rainfall with climate
change," Famiglietti said. "Those dry areas are getting dryer. They and
everyone else in the world's arid regions need to manage their available
water resources as best they can."
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