Water Not Wars Likely To Change Middle East Politics

Water rather than ethnic and religious conflict is likely to be the real game changer in the Middle East in the next 20 years says Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) director Jon Alterman.  Writing in the Washington think tank’s  Middle East Notes and Comment , Alterman argues that the drying up of the region’s groundwater wells and decreasing water quality will push water to the top of the agenda, force widespread changes in lifestyle and strengthen a widespread sense of government failure and incompetence.

Already the Middle East is the world’s most water-starved regions with 10 of the 15 water-poorest countries located in the region. Ironically, Alterman notes that when Saudi King Abdul Aziz first invited geologists to explore his desert kingdom, he was hoping to find water rather than oil. Oil wealth has propelled urbanization, changed lifestyles in water-consuming ways and provided the funding to exploit massive underground water supplies to secure those lifestyles by, for example, achieving food self-sufficiency.

Such policies served in part to ensure the longevity of authoritarian regimes that needed to be seen to be providing standards of life people had become accustomed to with the flow of petrodollars. The Gulf states, where water if priced was heavily subsidized, rank today among the largest consumers of water per capita of the population.  As a result, conservation measures such as market-dictated pricing of water are proving to be politically contentious and potentially dangerous mechanisms which most regimes have so far shied away from.

Nonetheless, Arab regimes can no longer escape the fact that current water policies are unsustainable and that the region’s agricultural revolution if unchecked will render it dry in the not all too distant future. Saudi Arabia has drawn a first conclusion from this realization by declaring that it would phase out the growing of wheat in the kingdom by 2016.

Alterman warns that the Middle East’s wells are a finite resource that are being exploited to an extent far beyond their ability to replenish themselves. Already, wells are being dug ever deeper and producing water that is increasingly less pure. The Yemeni capital Sana’a is set to become in the next ten years the world’s first capital to run out of water. The Jordanian capital could follow Sana’a hot on its heels.

It’s a doomsday scenario: agriculture collapses and major cities are left with no water to serve their inhabitants. The fall will be harder in those parts of the Middle East that don’t have the petrodollars to fund expensive and energy-intensive desalination. More than ever, water will become political and a litmus test for already questionable government credibility. The political dividing lines would likely harden as a result of the fact that some of the Middle East’s largest agricultural water users are also among its most powerful families, including its rulers. This, Alterman notes, makes it all the more difficult to impose and enforce the changes needed to evade disaster.

Nevertheless, Alterman says, “the situation is not entirely hopeless.”  Alterman advocates reforming agricultural policies, enhancing farming methods, aggressively recycling waste water, enhancing government oversight of wells, introducing pricing regimes that would encourage conservation and investing in renovation of water supply systems. Some of those steps, governments could take without significant political risk and pain, others they are likely to see as so controversial that they could spark public expressions of disaffection.  The question is whether they recognize soon enough that they are between a rock and a hard place.

Saudi Desalination Plant Promises Cheaper Water

In a region dependent on fossil fuel-driven desalination plants, Saudi Arabia hopes to significantly reduce the cost of producing potable water from the salty waters of the Gulf with the Gulf’s first solar-powered desalination plant. If successful, the Saudi example could encourage other oil and sun-rich Gulf states, who rank among the world’s biggest carbon emitters, to reduce their emissions by building similar plants..

The solar-powered plant is being built by the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), the epicenter of the kingdom’s efforts to break its puritan Islamic mould in a bid to ensure technological and economic development, and IBM, which has made water one of its key areas of focus.

“The culmination of our joint research initiatives has enabled us to radically reduce the cost of water through the development of nanotechnologies that revolutionize traditional desalination methods and renewable energy sources,” Takreem el Tohamy, IBM general manager for the Middle East and North Africa, told The National.

Traditional desalination plants in Saudi Arabia produce a cubic meter of water at a relatively high cost of $.067 to $1.47 compared to Singapore cubic meter and the United States, whose cost can be as little as $0.46 per cubic meter.

Located in Al Khafji, the solar-powered will also reduce cost by employing membranes instead of boiling processes to remove the salt from seawater, IBM and KACST said in a statement.IBM announced last year it had developed a new energy-eficient membrane that has a longer lifespan than previous materials. The Al Khafji plant will generate fresh water by pushing seawater through membranes to remove the salt. The solar component of the plant will produce the electricity needed to drive the machinery.

The project’s scale will overshadow pilot solar desalination plants that have been built in a number of Gulf countries, including a plant that opened in Abu Dhabi’s Al Gharbia region last year with a daily capacity of 68.2 cubic meters. Gulf countries have been trying to build cost-effective solar desalination plants for decades. Abu Dhabi built a plant at Umm al Nar in the 1980s, but it proved to be economically infeasible.

IBM and KACST predict the cost reduction despite the fact that the new plant will use electricity from concentrated solar technology that produces power at a cost many times higher than power stations fired by natural gas or oil. Electricity will come from concentrated photovoltaics, a technology that blends traditional photovoltaic cells with mirrors, lenses and motors to concentrate the rays of sun, thereby more than doubling the efficiency of the panels.

The technology is significantly more expensive than traditional photovoltaic cells alone but takes up less space and operates better in hot climates. The increased cost of using electricity from solar panels at Al Khafji will be offset by the vast efficiency gains of using the new membranes rather than heat to take the salt out of seawater.

Groping For Water in Saudi Arabia

Saudia Arabia has launched a major effort to search for water, according to Der Spiegel.

To do so, it has hired a German geologist German development agency GTZ, which is drilling holes up to 2,000 meters deep to conduct pumping tests and apply complex measuring techniques and computer models. The tests are designed determine how much fossil groundwater remains stored between layers of rock beneath the Arabian Peninsula. GTZ is assisted by the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig, which uses supercomputers to simulate groundwater currents from the last ice age until today.

The Saudi effort is prompted by the realization that its current pattern of water consumption is unsustainable and that water supply would run out in 3o years at current consumption rates. With its research, GTZ expects Saudi Arabia to become a test case for arid regions, which make up about 40 percent of the world's land area.

Fossil groundwater is the only natural water source in a region without rivers and lakes, where every raindrop is an event. After the last ice age, when the climate on the Arabian Peninsula was similar, in terms of temperature and precipitation, to that of savanna regions today, the water seeped away into the ground, eventually accumulating in hollow spaces between layers of sedimentary rock.

Most of this water is in eastern Saudi Arabia, home to most of the country's oil and natural gas reserves. As a result, geologists searching for oil sometimes find water and vice-versa. And like oil, the precious drops of water from the last ice age are finite. Too much of that water is now being pumped out of ever-deeper wells, causing the water table to drop. This in turn allows salt water to seep into the groundwater along the coasts.

To tackle its water scarcity problem, Saudi Arabia has already halted its attempts to turn its deserts into green pastures and achieve food security by promoting domestic agriculture. To do so, the agriculture ministry was stripped of its discretionary authority in all things water. In 2007, the government canceled all subsidies for wheat farming and said the country's wheat production would be wound down by 2016. Instead Saudi Arabia is moving to buy agricultrual land in Africa and Asia and to import wheat and other agricultural products. It also is encouraging small farmers in Saudi Arabia return to traditional agriculture and plant drought-resistant date palms, or grow profitable vegetable crops in greenhouses.

"Our biggest challenge is the conflict between agriculture and other water users," Deputy Water Minister Mohammed Al-Saud told Der Spiegel. "Anyone who wants to develop agriculture does so at the expense of water. And you can't conserve water without having a negative impact on agriculture."

Eventually, the minister hopes to make Saudi Arabia a model for other countries by monitoring water consumption on farms in real time, which would allow the government to develop a comprehensive water strategy. GTZ is preparing the first step in that direction by developing a computer model that would determine for any location in the country the nearest aquifer and calculate its size where it would make most sense to drill a well.

Water Is Key To Demise of Islam's Golden Age and Contemporary Turmoil

In a world dominated by authoritarian states, strife and lack of development, Muslims recall the early days when Muslim forces ruled an empire stretching from Spain to Central Asia and were the world’s leaders in science and the arts and ask themselves what went wrong. The answer, according to a just published book, may be water.

In a sweeping history of water, journalist Steven Solomon, argues that water has stood at the cradle and grave of great empires. Muslim armies harnessed the water management of the camel to turn the desert from an unproductive, isolating stretch of land into a highway of conquest, expansion and cultural exchange. Highly maneuverable dhows allowed them to dominate the Indian Ocean and extend lucrative trade routes from Indonesia’s Spice Islands to the Mediterranean.

Islam’s Golden Age began to crumble when Muslim forces became complacent about the need for continued innovation to improve the efficiency of water use and stay technologically ahead of their inherent scarcity of freshwater resources. Muslim naval forces failed to adapt to Christian gunpowder-based naval power. When nomadic Turks effectively occupied the Abbasid levers of power, they focused on water holes and seasonal grazing lands, allowing canal and irrigation systems to deteriorate.

A thousand years later, the Middle East is again on the front lines of a global freshwater crisis. It is the first region to have virtually run out of water, housing a host of countries with water tensions, conflicts and troubled states. Oil-rich Gulf states are flush with petro dollars invested in mega projects to diversify their economies and plan for a post-oil era, but they are unable or unwilling to ensure success by not committing the same mistakes that led to their ancestors’ decline.

A recent report by Riyadh-based NCB Capital warns that Gulf states have at best 550 cubic meters a year per person in renewable water resources compared to 89,000 cubic meters for every Canadian citizen. Yet, Gulf residents are among the world’s biggest water consumers. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) puts consumption in Saudi Arabia and the UAE at close to 1,000 cubic meters a person and approaching US levels of 1,648 meters.

While municipal consumption in the Gulf is the world’s second highest, only outstripped by Canada, agriculture is the real culprit in the Gulf. Efforts starting in the 1970s to achieve self-sufficiency have drained ground water reserves and with agriculture accounting for 80 percent of consumption but only two percent of GDP are now being rolled back. Gulf states have adopted a policy of a kind of agro-imperialism, buying huge tracts of land in impoverished countries in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe to ensure future food security, but refuse to harness technologies such as hydroponics and drip-fed irrigation that would enable them to develop a smaller, more sustainable agricultural industry. “They don’t seem to want to know,” John Lawton, a Riyadh-based British agricultural consultant, told the Financial Times .

Yet, the history of water as a determinant of power teaches that correcting unsustainable situation is not enough. Boosting water supplies through desalination without seeking to curb demand produces new problems. Upgrading aging infrastructure increases efficiency and reduces water loss estimated in Saudi Arabia at 35 percent by the  World Bank but is only one of many policies Gulf states should be adopting.

To guarantee continued regional and global power, Gulf leaders and governments would have to continuously innovate and take bold and courageous decisions. Unlike 1,000 years ago that would involve largely unpopular regimes forging a different pact with the region’s population, one that is more open, liberal and transparent than the current deal in which authoritarian government is tolerated in exchange for cradle to grave welfare.

Subsidies for water in the Gulf are among the world’s highest, making the region’s water tariffs among the world’s lowest and removing a major incentive for greater water conservation.  The  Financial Times quotes Bahrain Water and Electricity Authority CEO Abdulmajeed Ali Alawadhu as saying that raising tariffs would be the easiest way to curb consumption “but that requires a political will.” In fact, it would be too risky says Jamro Kotilaine, NCB Capital chief economist and author of the water report. “In Bahrain, even the suggestion of raising prices can provoke demonstrations.”

Water, The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power and Civilization by Steven Solomon, Harper Collins, 2010

GCC Water Resources