Take 6: first to film the worlds largest water conveyance project at Disi

Water excavated is settling behind a sand-dam before being processed at one of the drilling locations.

A true oasis in the desert, billion years old ground water is excavated close to Jordan-Saudi Arabia border, to be pumped along 350 km to the capital city Amman. Truly fascinating experience, almost felt like the movie Armageddon with all the big drilling equipment and the dramatic desert landscape. Managed to also interview a local shepherd and an agro-engineer, both at a very large potato farm nearby that will be shut down as they are forced to close the irrigation wells pumping water from the same aquifer. I think I am very satisfied with todays trip, best tip: wear harder-duty jeans when you plan on going rock climbing in the desert to get the best shot :)

Take 5: interviewing the water journalist

Today I interviewed Reem al Rawashdeh, a journalist covering water since 2005 for the largest Jordanian daily, Al Rai. Reem has a lot of knowledge about dealing with water scarcity in the country on both the domestic and the national levels. 

Some of the highlights of the interview: there is more awareness of the water issue in less fortunate areas, but then again, there's less population growth in more fortunate neighbourhoods. There's also better coordination around the Jordan river basin in the east, than the Yarmouk river basin in the north, and an amicable agreement with the Saudis in the south on the shared Disi aquifer.

She says that dealing with water scarcity is part of every child's upbringing, but much can still be done on raising awareness to improve domestic water saving, rain water harvesting, water reuse, etc. She is quite hopeful that the solutions on the table will contribute much to improving water access for domestic use.

When it comes to water use in agriculture, she mentions workable pilot projects where agriculture uses treated waste water, saving fresh water resources for drinking purposes only.

However, her main concern is with how some interpret the human right to water - she says one of the most chronic problems in Jordan is when individuals steal water, reasoning that it is their god given right and not a commodity. On the other hand, the vast majority of Jordanians is willing to pay a higher price for water access, which is one thing that they will eventually have to do as soon as they start receiving water from the Disi acquifer in the south.

Take 4: Jordan's water and energy shortage will be history by 2022

Good news. All Jordan's water woes will be over by 2022. This is the message I was left with while leaving the Ministry of Water. I went there earlier this morning to seek answers to very simple questions, what caused the severity of Jordan's extreme water shortage, and what is the solution.

The answer to the first question, as it came from the head of communications at the ministry, Adnan al Zouby, was simple and not totally unexpected: drastic population growth. Since 1948, Jordan recieved millions of refugees from Palestine, Iraq, and other countries in the region. Those usually came in groups over 100,000, and were immediately adding a strain on infrastructure and resources. More recently, since 2003, Jordan recieved a number of up to 1.5 million so called refugees - and huge development projects in the field of real-estate, hotel and tourism, etc, added also to this strain.

The solution to this problem - apart from the usual water saving business and waste water reuse is three fold: pumping water out of the disi aquifer in the south (starting 2013), which is a temporary solution until Jordan is able to finish linking the Red Sea to the Dead Sea, desalinating water along the way, creating hydro-energy and using waste water to cool a nuclear power reactor under the way - which in turn will provide enough energy for the desalination processes.

The Jordan Red Sea project is part two, as explained here. The third part would be linking this project with Israel and Palestinian Territories for optimal water sharing. By 2022, the three projects should be done and practical.

Meanwhile, or until the first project is completely operational, Jordanians could expect to recieve half as much water as they do today, or recieve water to their home for a few hours every second week, as opposed to every week now.

This means that both Nestle's Pure Life, and Pepsi Co's Aquafina will continue to enjoy providing clean water to about one third of the water bottle market. As the quality of water provided in these projects is another issue that will not be solved by 2022.

Tomorrow I am interviewing a journalist who will give me an explanation to what this means for the average household. And on Thursday, I will be joining others to visit the Disi project site.



Take 3: hard talk at the world economic forum

I just came back from the Dead Sea, where I attended a closed, high-level meeting on paving Jordan's water future. Lovely. Now I can look for answers to many unanswered questions that I have gathered throughout the past few days - the farmer, the environmentalist, the young water professional, they all had unanswered questions too, which I put forward on the discussion table.

The meeting was held with the patronage of Prince Faisal Bin al Hussain, which was a good thing, in the sense that he was willing to listen, to answer and to discuss things openly, albeit in a closed meeting.

Following some presentations, the invited participants were divided into four discussion groups - water demand, water supply, water institutions and water politics - I happily ended up sitting on the later, with top level executives at USAID, Pepsi Co, Qatar Foundation, and the former President of Rotary International.

Questions that I raised were well received, I thought. As I brought up the environmentalist's dire wish to have integration of the work of all Jordanian authorities dealing with water - something along the lines of a regulatory body overarching the water, energy, environment and agriculture ministries. I also brought up the need for regional integration - where you could produce food in Sudan, desalinated water in Saudi Arabia, etc, capitalising on what has already been established before trying to find near impossible ways for self-sufficiency.

My examples and questions were then discussed at the meeting at large. To which the Prince answered: we cannot opt for regional integration when we do not develop reliable data on, for example, how much does agriculture contribute to our GDP (meaning that we don't know how much do we need to export - and that the market is free for products to compete without any regulation).  On the need for integration within the Jordanian governement structures, he says there are attempts by the Royals to keep the water agenda on top, but there is a need for capacity building on the top managerial level - admitting what other participants already agreed on - the middle management is more equipped with information than top management along Jordanian governance structures.

He then highlighted an issue that 2-3 other interviewees in my documentary deemed very important: mentality - how people approach the water issue on all levels.

Finally, I got to interview many of the participants at the closed meeting, and I was happy to turn away and head back to Amman. One thing that frustrated me was the inability to record scenery shots, because everytime I put the camera up, someone would come and tell me its not allowed to film around here (yes, the level of security paranoia around this event is extreme - a trip to the dead sea usually takes 30 min - took me half day to fix the permits, park at parking places, shuttle myself to the meeting on two different closed-zone shuttles (although the security personnel were all quite helpful, the vulgar dispaly of military power was too much machismo.)

Take 2: Rsaifeh - a microcosm of global water issues

Yesterday I joined a group of water experts from Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen for a field study to Rsaifeh - which is an impoverished industrial / residential area sandwiched between and linking two major cities, Amman and Zarqa. 

Many decades ago, the area prospered around the Zarqa River, which later dried up to become a seasonal torrent, which was totally dry at the time of our visit yesterday. The river dried due to extremely rapid and disorganised urbanisation, industrial expansion, and due to pumping a major share of its water to serve the big cities, which in turn, poured waste water into the torrent. A treatment station was established to treat waste water downstream, i.e. after Rsaifeh. So the residents of Rsaifeh are meant to live with the fact that the big cities took their clean water and gave them bad waste water instead - without any compensation.

On the "bank" of the torrent, we met one farmer who grows different vegetables by the nation's only yeast factory. He irrigates his crops with the factory's waste water, which he says is "bio-degradable" - impressive use of terminology from a farmer who never finished his school education.

Farmer Abu Khaled (left) and friends, with their plot of land behind, and  urbanisation  crawling down on their land.

The factory owner thinks this is a good deal. He provides waste water from yeast production to the farmer for free, instead of having to transfer it to a waste water treatment plant and pay a large sum for them to clean and reuse the waters. The Rsaifeh municipality had earlier banned his factory from pouring its waste water into the Zarqa torrent, and deemed the water unhealthy. Both the farmer and the factory owner think this is a good deal, as crops grow successfully using this "free" water. 

However, the agriculture ministry thinks this is a bad idea, and would often come and plough the crops away because they deem them harmful (although they've never tested the biodegradability of this sample of waste water in agricultural production). Farmer becomes unhappy.

Another problem, is the urban expansion. Ministry of municipalities has finally agreed, after lobbying from farmers, environmental activists, and a cooperative for local women to stop allocating this farmland as a low-cost residential area. However, urbanisation is closing in on the little green plots that are left, and air, land and water pollution is rapidly increasing. Which puts the quality of the agricultural products in question, regardless of the water used for irrigation.

Climate change increases the dryness of this area, also very noticeably. Poverty and underdevelopment there is easy to see and relate to. In short, this little farm plot is everything the world water community agenda is all about.

Take one still: booking interviews, going south

Today I had a meeting with Reem al-Masri from 7iber, the leading jordanian alternative news and analysis source. Reem is working with a 7iber project called "once upon a water in jordan" which is a play on words in arabic to once upon a time.. what they do is arrange location shooting for social media activists, photographers, film crews etc, to report on different local stories, which they produce later for their own web and for different screenings.

This is their facebook page.

The meeting was very successful, we went through what they've done and what they'd like to do, and we agreed that they will help me arrange interviews tomorrow at the Ministry of Water which will lead to a trip to the controversial DISI project site in the south of Jordan (a 3-4 hour drive from my current location). The project is deemed as a solution to jordan's water woes, although totally unsustainable, as it will pump water from a ground water basin in the south desert along hundreds of kilometres to the capital - something that really pissed off the local inhabitants of that area, as they don't even get to do construction work, which is done by a Turkish contractor. Another controversy that arose recently were claims by a study group that water in the disi aquifer were contaminated and radioactive, the claims were shrugged off as a political play from Israel who wants Jordan to stay dependent on the jordan river basin, shared with Israel, and on the possibility (almost none) of going ahead with the red-dead project, pumping water from the red sea into the dead sea and desalinating a fair amount of that water for municipal use (check map).

IT will be interesting to interview the people down south, and then put their questions in front of the officials in the capital for answers. This bit of the film will be produced together with 7iber for a seperate screening in November, details are still to be concluded.

Things are just moving along!

Take one: I am producing a documentary on dealing with scarce water

Four days since I landed in Amman, and after a short break by the shores of the Red Sea, I am back in Jordan's capital to start my months long self-appointed mission: to produce a documentary. Today I stepped out of my comfort zone and took the camera out of its bag, started ringing around and booking appointments for possible interviews and trips to different locations around the country.

But first things first. What is the documentary about? This is a good question that I have to keep asking myself all along the process. The initial idea is to document how ideas discussed in international forums like the World Water Week in Stockholm, the World Economic Forum, and Arab Water Forum translate in real life down at the bottom of the "supply chain". What ideas? Ideas of water management, dealing with water scarcity, waters role in climate change, and more NGO speech - do they ever leave conference halls and policy papers? Or do they translate at households, farms, and even at water ministries, management utilities, or just down at the street!

After making some calls, I headed to The Jordan Times newspaper, my employer about 7 years ago. I went there because I know they are excellent at archiving everything, including the so-called "water-beat". You won't find any other place in Jordan that has a more comprehensive archive of water stories.

I flipped through the 2010-2011 folder -- for some reason I like to flip through paper folders than search for articles on the Internet. And voila, there you go, 1 opinion piece, 3 articles with bylines from Stockholm (I work at www.siwi.org) and an article covering a local lecture on Green Water - a concept that was developed in Stockholm too by one of our knowledge leaders, Prof. Malin Falkenmark, back in 1995. Good, first stop with some achievement: a confirmation of something that I already know: many concepts like Green Water, developed at international forums, translate in many shapes and forms and end up in local newspapers and local academic lecture rooms.

Green water: a concept that was mostly developed and coined at  the Stockholm International Water Institute, much of the work is attributable to Professor Malin Falkenmark. This paper clip was found in a local newspaper in Jordan.

Still, we're speaking NGO, intellectual elites within the water box. After all the journalist who wrote the article is very familiar with water issues and terminology, and so was the lecturer. Do politicians account for green water when they are negotiating water agreements with other countries?

I'll have to ask, and yes, I'll have to simplify this, I am still speaking NGO speech. Green water is the water that exists in nature in other forms than physical water: one example is rain water or waste water that is going into the ground - the idea is revolutionary: it means that no water is truly wasted, but is somehow recycled into other physical bodies in nature, such as land, animals, foods, etc. At least that's how I understand it!

It will be a challenge to get out of the water bucket (an inside joke which means to think outside the box in the water research world). But it is not impossible. I feel that I will learn much, and scale down, and simplify as I go along.

The shooting will take place in Jordan, Egypt, and hopefully later in Morocco, Spain and Portugal. Many maps as the ones below will be drawn, followed and explained. and you'll see a lot of faces, and hear many different dialects and languages, speaking water, not NGO speech.