A Crisis of Good Will

If you were to ask a Jordanian about the biggest issues in the ongoing civil war in Syria, a likely response would involve the considerable influx of Syrian refugees into Jordan and the many difficulties in housing them.

Over the last two years of Syrian fighting, the war-torn country’s relatively stable neighbor has received a substantial number of refugees–a challenging situation considering the minimal water resources available to the state, an amount barely sufficient for Jordanians alone.

Jordan’s water supply stems from both surface water and groundwater, but primarily the latter. Consumption clocks in at about 680 million cubic meters (MCM), is split primarily between agricultural (67%) and domestic (28%) uses, and exceeds the available renewable supply. Additionally, the annual per capita share of the national water supply in 1995 (see graph below) was less than 200 cubic meters, placing the country below the water poverty line.

-Courtesy of www.kinghussein.gov.jo

As of September 2012, the U.S. State Department estimates that there are approximately 54,000 registered Syrian refugees in Jordan; three times as many unregistered refugees have likely crossed the border. Most live in border camps such as Al Za’atari (mapped below); many others live with host families spread across the country.

The United Nations High Commisioner for Refugees (UNHCR) recommends 20 liters per person per day as the minimum volume of water required to prevent deterioration of health. Multiply that by 200,000 Syrians and that’s more than 4 million liters per day, or 4,000 cubic meters per day. If you expand this to the approximately 15 million required over the course of the year, that is already 2 percent of the total freshwater reserves. It doesn’t sound like much, but for an arid country already overdrawing, a 2% increase in less than a year will certainly make an impact.

And so the challenge is great for Jordan, even with the help of international aid agencies. The UNHCR’s Andrew Harper recently spoke with VOA News about the challenges of the Syrian refugee situation, noting Jordan’s debt-ridden government and the lack of substantial foreign aid.

-Courtesy of http://publicintelligence.net

This is of course not the first time foreign refugees have placed stress on Jordan’s precious natural resources. The small kingdom shares a border with Lebanon, the occupied Palestinian West Bank and Iraq, all of which have seen significant warfare in the last 25 years. The Iraq war alone brought hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to Jordan over the last decade. The UNHCR estimates that some 450,000 remain.

With no end in sight to the Syrian crisis and dangerous trends in water use and availability of domestic supplies (the shrinking Dead Sea is one example), it’s hard to say how this will play out. Jordan’s ongoing leniency in accepting such a task is admirable, but I fear for the future of this costly aid.