“Syrian refugees have increased water needs by 21 percent throughout the Kingdom and 40 percent in the north,” Iyad Dahiyat, Jordan’s minister of water, told FranceInfo last year.
According to the ministry, each Syrian refugee costs the water sector approximately 440 JD/year.
The past 350 years have seen little progress on the project, due primarily to geopolitical tensions preventing cooperation among Jordan, Israel, and Palestine, all of which have a significant stake in the body of water.
Phase I involves the construction of a desalination plant north of Aqaba, which will process 80-100 million cubic meters of water per year.
After desalination, salt brine will be piped to the Dead Sea in hopes of saving it from evaporation.
The infrastructure project builds on a 2015 water-swap agreement between Jordan, Israel, and Palestine.
“There’s still a connection through the canal, but overall, it’s more of a water swap agreement between the three governments than the huge canal that was planned in the ’90s.” Saving a Symbol Officials are hopeful that the RSDSCP will help alleviate the country’s drought, but also that it will save a symbolically important body of water: the Dead Sea.
Now, the sea is rapidly evaporating, receiving only 10 percent of the freshwater necessary to replenish itself.
“The symbolic importance of saving the Dead Sea is important for the two countries from a funding perspective,” Hussein told the HPR.
Water scarcity problems around the world are a shared problem and a shared responsibility,” she said.