A new report on ‘hydrodiplomacy’ envisions a caring, sharing Middle Eastern regional water agreement. Ellen Hardy reports.

On January 20, regional and international experts gathered at the Carnegie Middle East Center think tank in Downtown Beirut for the launching of a significant new report ‘The Blue Peace: Rethinking Middle East Water’. The fruit of 18 months’ research by local water experts and written up by the Mumbai-based Strategic Foresight Group, the report as author Sundeep Waslekar explained, aims to ‘turn crisis into opportunities for creation.’

Lebanon is one of five countries that are held within a transborder water basin, along with Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Jordan. The region is in deep crisis, with river outputs decreasing from 30-90% across the region in the last 50 years. Also concerned in the regional water diplomacy efforts are Israel and the Occupied Territories, whose mountain aquifer has decreased by 7% since 1993-4. Both Lebanese experts on the panel, Dr Fadi Comair, President of the Mediterranean Network of River Basins Organisation, and Dr Selim Catafago, President of the Board of the Litani River Authority, expressed concerns over Israel’s approach to the use of water resources and refusal to ratify cooperation treaties that could lead to more substantial regional cooperation. Israel, however, did contribute to the report’s research.

As the report states, ‘watercourses... do not understand political boundaries’, so it provides a regional perspective and recommendations on forming regional water agreements that can ensure equable access to water across boundaries separate from political developments, and even influencing them; ‘the blue peace concept assures that no two countries that have access to adequate, clean and affordable water would ever go to a war in the twenty-first century.’ The report envisions a situation where national boundaries are not obstacles to fair and healthy water access, and believes that with careful management everyone in the region could have a personal drinking water allowance of 200 litres per day. There are already examples of such initiatives, such as the cooperation between Lebanon and Syria over use of water flows from the Orontes and Nahr el Kebir rivers. ‘The Blue Peace’ report would like to see these extended regionwide, for the future of all.

The report will be officially launched in Switzerland in February. All documents, a video of the launch and Arabic language summaries are available at www.carnegie-mec.org.