"Water Scarcity: Adaptation and Mitigation in Amman" by Madeleine Walker
This past semester, I took a course called Biodiversity and Climate Change at my university. Instead of taking a traditional final exam, I opted to undertake a project on present-day examples of adaptation and mitigation in response to suboptimal climate conditions. Given my major in Middle East Studies, perhaps it is no surprise that my project centered on water scarcity in Jordan. However, little did I know when I presented my findings that I would be experiencing those conditions firsthand just months later.
Hello and welcome to my first blog post! My name is Madeleine Walker and I was raised in Connecticut, although my family is Canadian. I am a rising junior in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and majoring in Middle East Studies (formally called Regional and Comparative Studies, with a concentration in the Middle East and North Africa) with a minor in Arabic.
I was led to pursue this education by a series of cultural and linguistic opportunities provided to me by the US State Department, including the Kennedy-Lugar YES Abroad scholarship for Moroccan exchange and the Critical Language Scholarship for virtual Arabic study through the Noor-Majan Institute in Oman. These experiences, firsthand and virtual, cemented my interest in facilitating mutually beneficial economic and political relations between the US and majority-Muslim and Arabic-speaking countries.
I am continuing to pursue this interest today, as I write from my host family’s dining room table in Amman, Jordan. Here, I will spend a month studying Arabic at Amideast, funded in part by the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship.
Now, back to water. Upon arrival in Amman, I quickly learned that Jordan is the second most water scarce country in the world. The municipality of Amman distributes water to its residents once a week, and this day varies by neighborhood. For my host family, it’s Monday. On Mondays, the water in our building runs continuously for several hours as it does in the average American home: accessible at all times and in seemingly limitless quantities. In Amman, this brief timeframe is when most Ammani residents do their laundry and mop the floors.
On their assigned day, residents also fill up (usually) two-thousand-liter water tanks located on their roofs, which they then use sparingly throughout the week. If the water runs out, there is little to be done except buy outrageously priced water bottles at local convenience stores. Below is a photo of one residential building’s rooftop water tanks, photographed from an outdoor staircase in Jabal Amman.
Amman’s water supply comes from 100 meters underground, in the desert surrounding valleys such as Wadi Rum in the south, as well as other, less productive lands located throughout the country. According to USAID, the water available within Jordan’s borders is only sufficient for the consumption of two thirds of the country’s population.[1] Over draining, therefore, quickly leads to water shortages.
Long-term solutions to the deficit have been previously proposed, such as water transported from the Red Sea, which would then be purified in desalination plants. However, cost and time have slowed the country’s invocation of such measures.[2] In the meantime, national and local policy regarding water management and usage for short-term mitigation has been put in place, including Amman’s weekly water distribution days. While such policy restrictions could prove inconvenient to individuals from time to time, they are necessary precursors to long-term, sustainable water conditions in Jordan.
With this reality in mind, I admire the Jordanian government’s ability to acknowledge and (at least in the short term) successfully mitigate a major resource deficit - especially in a time of steadily increasing population size and the looming, ever-growing threat of climate change.
[1] https://www.usaid.gov/jordan/water-resources-environment
[2] https://www.water-technology.net/projects/greater_amman/
