Arab World Sinks Deeper into Water Crisis, Warns UNDP

The Arab world is widely perceived as blessed with an embarrassment of riches: an abundance of oil (Saudi Arabia), one of the world’s highest per capita incomes (Qatar), and home to the world’s tallest luxury building (United Arab Emirates).

But it lacks one of the most finite resources necessary for human survival: water.

“The average Arab citizen has eight times less access to renewable water than the average global citizen, and more than two thirds of surface water resources originate from outside the region,” says the U.N.Development Programme (UNDP) in a new study released this week.

Titled “Water Governance in the Arab Region: Managing Scarcity and Securing the Future,” the report warns that water scarcity in the region is fast reaching “alarming levels, with dire consequences to human development”.

The region accounts for five percent of the world’s more than seven billion people, and 10 percent of its area, but accounts for less than one percent of global water resources.

Its share of annual renewable water resources is also less than one percent, and it receives only 2.1 percent of average annual global precipitation.

Over 87 percent of the region’s terrain is desert and 14 of the world’s 20 most water-stressed countries are in this region, the study notes.

Maude Barlow, a former senior U.N. advisor on water and author of “Blue Future, Protecting Water for People and the Planet Forever”, told IPS the Middle East is in “a water crisis.”

Desertification is a sweeping problem in countries such as Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Iran.

The greatest culprits, she pointed out, are unsustainable agricultural practices that guzzle the last of the area’s groundwater.

“Dams and diversions for heavy irrigation are destroying water sources at an alarming rate,” she warned.

A recent satellite study by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) found the region has lost, since 2003 alone, far more groundwater than previously thought – an amount the size of the Dead Sea, said Barlow.

At an international water conference in Abu Dhabi last January, Crown Prince Gen. Sheikh Mohammed bi Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a major oil producer, said: “For us, water is [now] more important than oil.”

“Only a concerted effort to fiercely protect the region’s water as a public trust and human right together with strict laws to prevent over-extraction and pollution and outright water theft will avert the crisis coming.”
—Maude BarlowThreatened by future scarcities, several Arab countries, including the UAE, have expanded their use of non-conventional water resources including desalination; treated wastewater; rainwater harvesting; cloud seeding; and irrigation drainage water.

Currently, the Arab region leads the world in desalination, with more than half of global capacity.