According to the Boston Herald and The Jordan Times, Jordan will pursue the long-talked about canal project between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea without Israel. According to news reports, Jordan declared its intention this past Sunday at the 2009 World Economic Forum in the Middle East, held at the Dead Sea in Jordan. The original plan had called for Jordan to cooperate with Israel on the canal and the World Bank was in the midst of assessing the feasibility of the joint project. Now that Jordan has decided to go it alone, it has dubbed its project “Jordan National Red Sea Water Development Project” in order to differentiate it from the original “Red-Dead Canal” proposal.
The purpose behind the project is two-fold. The first is to provide desalinated water to one of the most parched regions of the world. Red Sea water will be channeled through pipelines to a desalination facility that, using the elevation difference between the Red Sea (at sea level) and the Dead Sea (approximately 400 meters below sea level), is expected to provide 120 mcm of fresh water annually by 2014, and eventually at full capacity, as much as 700 mcm. The second rationale for the project is to revive the “dying” Dead Sea, which over the past 20 or 30 years, has lost about one-third of its area and dropped more than 30 meters. The Sea has been desiccated for the same reasons that the Aral Sea has been drying out (see my prior post on the Aral Sea) – because of Israeli and Jordanian upstream diversions from the Jordan River (the Dead Sea’s principle source of water) that have reduced the river’s inflow to as little as five percent of natural historical natural flows (check out the website and Photo Album of Friends of the Earth Middle East on the Dead Sea). The idea is to take the salts removed in the desalination process and pump them back into the remaining waters used to fill the heavily saline Dead Sea (10 times the salinity of sea water).
That Jordan is going it alone may not be much of a surprise. Jordan has been frustrated with environmentalists in Israel who have long challenged the plan as an environmentally destructive plan. They cite the different chemistries of Red Sea and Dead Sea water and the potential alteration of the chemical makeup that makes the Dead Sea so distinctive as well as the possible impact on currents in the Red Sea that could threaten the Red Sea’s unique coral life (see, for example, the campaign of Friends of the Earth Middle East). Without the obstacles of the Israeli environmentalists, Jordan, which only has a nascent environmental movement, can move forward at its own whim.
Of course, a critical question will be whether Jordan can secure the necessary funds for the project, which is expected to cost around $5-$10 billion and to take 30 years to complete. Without Israel and in the context of a peace initiative (some have dubbed the original Red-Dead Canal project as the “Peace Canal”), that may be difficult. But that may be part of Jordan’s strategy to overcome the environmental opposition and pressure Israel to commit to the plan. And Jordan’s tactic may be working. Not long after Jordan’s announced its intentions to move forward with its own plan, Israel’s Water Authority expressed its hope that a cooperative arrangement could yet be achieved. And Israel certainly has good reasons to want to take part in this project – while the majority of the benefits from a Red-Dead canal will accrue to Jordan, Israel would still benefit considerably from fresh water in its Arava Valley, as well as a revived Dead Sea. According to the news reports, Jordan does not intend its new canal to replace the Red-Dead Canal Project. Would that allow for the possibility of two canals? Highly unlikely.
