CAIRO: The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UN-Escwa) organized a conference on “Evaluation and Adaptation of Existing Water Visions and Forecasts for Shared Aquifer Management in the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership Region (Meda) at the Mena House Oberoi Hotel in Giza on July 30-31.
The conference discussed knowledge transfer and data collection on shared groundwater aquifers as part of a greater proposal to create a regional groundwater management council for the Meda region, comprised of the North African states, Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey.
UN-Escwa proposed a three-stage process to create the council. The first step is to create a transitional consulting mechanism (TCM), which will coordinate data collection, facilitate needed technology transfer, and build consulting relationships between the various state water agencies. The TCM aims only to create a data collection system and build trust between states. Chief Engineer Yusuf Al-Mooji envisions the TCM to last for two years.
This will form the foundation of the next stage, the permanent consulting mechanism (PCM). The PCM will take TCM s data and relationships to work on fashioning a common understanding of acceptable water use policies in both technical and ethical terms. It will then work on building the capacity to settle disputes, and later begin to issue rulings – although these will not be final if one party does not accept them.
The final stage envisions a full regional water council with full knowledge of the shared aquifers in the region, the ability to adjudicate disputes, and then lastly the capability to implement its solutions.
The problems are not technical, Al-Mooji told Daily News Egypt. The problem is that there is very little cooperation. Countries do not wish to share information with each other about their water resources.
Each country acts without considering the effects upon the other. They can benefit from this plan by getting information on the other country s activities so that they will not be surprised one day to discover their aquifer depleted or polluted or otherwise damaged. It is really a benefit for them not to have this happen.
The challenge, he added, “is for each country to study the proposal and understand that it will benefit from increased cooperation. It is really is a win-win situation, and only after each country understands that it will benefit from cooperation will they then do so.
This cooperation, however, isn’t unheard of in the region.
Egypt, Libya, Sudan, and Chad already have a system in place to collect and pool data. We are also using Southeast Europe, former Yugoslavia and now many small states, as a model. They had similar problems in the past and now cooperate well, Al-Mooji explained.
Whether or not the conference will succeed is an open question, as participants acknowledged. The conference does not specifically deal with the issues of Israeli water usage of shared aquifers, a burning issue between Israel and its neighbors.
Other political developments may simply render any council s actions moot. For example, the war in Lebanon last summer severed all water coordination between Syria and Lebanon, and the political tensions there still directly impede joint management of water resources.
One thing is certain, however, all states agreed on the need for a common consensus on water management.
