Today, the nation’s water supply is more constrained than ever: wells are running dry, groundwater is increasingly polluted and precious water leaks from old pipes.
Samer Talozi, a water expert at the Jordan University of Science and Technology in Irbid, says that the country has become an international test bed because of the environmental, structural and social challenges to its water supply.
“If we can build systems that work in Jordan,” he says, “they will work everywhere.” But not all technologies evolving in Jordan are new.
In August, Hassan Fahad al-Rhaibeh, the mayor of the Jordanian town of Umm el-Jimal, was re-elected after pledging to restore reservoirs built by Arabs as early as ad 90.
Winter rains and run-off from mountains in Syria — 10 kilometres to the north — once streamed through canals and into basalt-block reservoirs, which stored the water throughout parched summers.
“It’s becoming apparent that if people don’t return to some reliance on surface water, they will run out and farms will dry up,” de Vries says.
The US Agency for International Development has invested more than US$700 million since 2000 to develop water technology in Jordan, as a way of preventing that outcome.
And the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany, is collaborating with the Jordanian government to test small, soil-filtered waste-treatment facilities that could lessen the leakage and inefficiencies seen in large plants, which can pollute nearby groundwater.
“The flow of Syrian refugees to Germany more or less started when camps in Jordan could not support them.” Talozi says the country might take its cue from ancient systems in Petra and Umm el-Jimal and store more rain — although these conduits alone cannot support today’s population.
“As civilizations rotated through this land, one constant over time is the reuse and reliance of the water system,” he says.