Jordan Water Project
At the heart of the Middle East, Jordan is one of the ten poorest countries in the world in terms of freshwater resource availability. The region is expected to experience temperature increases of about 2.5 degrees Celsius by mid-century with longer dry periods. Jordan is subject to water conflicts and demand increases due to the influx of Syrian refugees. On top of that, water management in Jordan is marked by institutional dysfunction. We have assembled an interdisciplinary team of international experts from the U.S., Canada, Germany, the U.K. and Jordan to explore how reform of Jordan’s institutional water usage rules can improve freshwater system performance.
In arid regions throughout the world, water system security is at a tipping point due to a confluence of drivers that include severely limited water supplies, rapid population growth and demographic shifts, climate change and variability, trans-boundary competition for shared freshwater resources, and institutional dysfunction. The overarching challenge is to sustain the human-natural system in the presence of rapid environmental and socioeconomic change.
The Jordan Water Project (JWP) is an international interdisciplinary research effort aimed at developing a new approach to evaluate policies to enhance sustainability of freshwater resource systems. It is supported by a consortium of G-8 nation science agencies through the Belmont Forum.
This effort focuses on development of an integrated framework to evaluate water policy interventions in water-stressed countries using Jordan as a model system. Jordan is representative of many arid regions where future natural and social changes set the stage for nationwide water supply failures. Existing water resources models ignore critical interactions between hydrologic and socioeconomic components, resulting in a lack of holistic analysis needed to make long-term policy decisions.
Our interdisciplinary team is developing a quantitative policy-evaluation tool to explore ways to enhance the sustainability of freshwater systems through such innovations as optimized allocation procedures, institutional re-structuring, subsidies/tariffs, water-lease markets, and trans-boundary institutions. We are constructing a modular, agent-based hydro-economic model in which each module captures scientific and local knowledge from a unique discipline synthesizing hydrologic, agronomic, and socioeconomic analysis into a coherent analytical framework. The modules will be linked through feedbacks among system components. The policy-evaluation model will combine simulation of natural phenomena including groundwater-surface water flow, crop yield, and soil / water salinity) with human decision-making at the institutional and user levels (water usage, regulation, allocation, trans-boundary water, and trade. We plan to evaluate a wide range of policy interventions based on a set of quantitative economic and environmental metrics.
In addition to developing a new tool for water policy analysis, JWP aims to identify innovative policy solutions for a water system that has exhausted traditional supply sources and is operating at the vulnerable edge. Our analysis of risks and benefits associated with policy solutions will be assessed, and management options communicated to stakeholders who will be actively solicited for input. The project will further set the groundwork for deploying the integrated framework to other water stressed regions throughout the globe.
Team Members
Postdoctoral and Student Team Members
Jim Yoon, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University
Deepthi Sekhar, Postdoctoral Fellow (former), Stanford University
Marc Muller, Postdoctoral Fellow (former), Stanford University
Bushra Bataineh, Graduate Student (former), Stanford University
See additional team members from Leipzig University, UFZ, Université Laval, University of Manchester, King's College, Jordan University of Science and Technology, and the National Center for Agricultural Research and Extension at the Directorate of Water, Soil and Environment Research, Jordan
Related News and Media
A virtually landlocked desert kingdom with few resources, the country’s yearly decrease in rainfall could lead to a 30% reduction by 2100, according to Stanford University’s Jordan Water Project.
Prolonged and potentially destabilizing water shortages will become commonplace in Jordan by 2100, new research finds, unless the nation implements comprehensive reform, from fixing leaky pipes to desalinating seawater. Jordan’s water crisis is emblematic of challenges looming around the world as a result of climate change and rapid population growth.
The Syrian civil war and subsequent refugee migration caused sudden changes in the area’s land use and freshwater resources, according to satellite data analyzed by Stanford researchers.
Publications
2018
Klassert, C. K. Sigel, B. Klauer, and E. Gawel, Increasing Block Tariffs in an Arid Developing Country: A Discrete/Continuous Choice Model of Residential Water Demand in Jordan, Water 2018, 10(3), 248;doi:10.3390/w10030248 http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/10/3/248
Klassert, C. K. Sigel, B. Klauer, and E. Gawel, Increasing Block Tariffs in an Arid Developing Country: A Discrete/Continuous Choice Model of Residential Water Demand in Jordan, Water 2018, 10(3), 248;doi:10.3390/w10030248
Knox, S., P. Meier, J. Yoon, J. Harou, 2018, A Python Framework for Multi-Agent Simulation of Networked Resource Systems, Environmental Modeling and Software 103: 16-28.
2017
Yoon, J. M. F. Müller, and S.M. Gorelick, 2017, How the Syrian refugee crisis affected land use and shared transboundary freshwater resources, Planet Policy, Brookings Institution
Sigel, K.,C. Klassert, H. Zozmann, S. Talozi, B. Klauer, E. Gawel, 2017, Socioeconomic surveys on private tanker water markets in Jordan: Objectives, design and methodology, UFZ Discussion Papers, Department of Economics
Rajsekhar, D. and S.M. Gorelick, 2017, Increasing drought in Jordan: Climate change and cascading Syrian land-use impacts on reducing transboundary flow, Science Advances, vol. 3, no. 8, e1700581,DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1700581.
Avisse, N., A. Tilmant, M. F. Müller, and H. Zhang, 2017, Monitoring small reservoirs storage from satellite remote sensing in inaccessible areas, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences
Zhang, H., S. M. Gorelick, P. V. Zimba, X. Zhang, 2017, An integrated remote sensing method for estimating reservoir area and evaporative loss, J. of Hydrology (555), p.213-227, doi: 10.1016/j.jhydrol.2017.10.007.
Müller,M.F., M. Müller-Itten, and S.M. Gorelick, 2017, How Jordan and Saudi Arabia are avoiding a tragedy of the commons over shared groundwater, Water Resources Research, doi: 10.1002/2016WR020261
2016
Müller, M. F., J. Yoon, S.M. Gorelick, N. Avisse, and A. Tilmant, 2016, Impact of the Syrian refugee crisis on land use and transboundary freshwater resources, Proc. National Academy of Science (PNAS)
Zhang, H., S.M. Gorelick, N. Avisse, and A. Tilmant, D. Rajsekhar, and J. Yoon. 2016. A new temperature-vegetation Triangle Algorithm with Variable Edges (TAVE) for satellite-based actual evapotranspiration estimation, Remote Sensing, 8, 735; doi:10.3390/rs8090735
2015
Mustafa, D., A. Altz-Stamm, L.M. Scott, 2015, Water User Associations and the politics of water in the Jordan Valley, World Development (email D. Mustafa for full paper - daanish.mustafa@kcl.ac.uk).
Klassert, C., Sigel, K., Gawel, E., and Klauer, B. 2015. Modeling Residential Water Consumption in Amman: The Role of Intermittency, Storage, and Pricing for Piped and Tanker Water, in: Water 7 (7), 3643-3670.
Gorelick, S.M. and J.C. Padowski, 2015, Identifying causes of freshwater vulnerability, Planet Policy, Brookings Institution
Rahman, K., S M. Gorelick, P.J. Dennedy-Frank, J. Yoon and B. Rajaratnam. 2015. Declining rainfall and regional variability changes in Jordan, Water Resour. Res., DOI: 10.1002/2015WR017153
Gorelick, S.M. and C. Zheng. 2015. Global change and the groundwater management challenge, Water Resour. Res., 51, doi:10.1002/2014WR016825.
Gorelick, S.M. 2015. Water Security in Jordan: A Key to the Future of the Middle East, Planet Policy, Brookings Institution
Padowski, J.C., S.M. Gorelick, B.H. Thompson, S.Rozelle, and S. Fendorf. 2015. Assessment of human–natural system characteristics influencing global freshwater supply vulnerability, Environmental Research Letters, 10.10 (2015): 104014.
2014
Padowski, J.C., and S.M. Gorelick. 2014. Global analysis of urban surface water supply vulnerability, Environmental Research Letters, 9 (10), 104004, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/9/10/104004
Online Publications
2017
Yoon, J., M.F. Muller, and S.M. Gorelick (2017). How the Syrian refugee crisis affected land use and shared transboundary freshwater resources, Planet Policy, Brookings Institution.
2015
Gorelick, S.M. (2015). Water Security in Jordan: A Key to the Future of the Middle East, Planet Policy, Brookings Institution.
Gorelick, S.M. and J. Padowski (2015). Identifying causes of global freshwater vulnerability, Planet Policy, Brookings Institution.
Dissertation
2017
Yoon, J.. Evaluation of water security in Jordan using a multiagent hydroeconomic model. (2017). Stanford University, Stanford, CA