How is water affecting politics in the Middle East and Northern Africa?

Question

How is the problem of water scarcity affecting water management? What are the tensions in the area between the areas do to water?

Answer 1

There is a good paper to read about this. It's titled " Seeking Sustainability: Isreal's Evoloving Water Management Strategy" bye Alon Tal. You can look it up on Google. They've been trying to find ways to get more water by suggesting things like transporting water, adding desalinization plants, and damming. The damming issue I think is the worst. I believe the Tigris and Euphrates water supply is controlled by Turkey, but Syria and Iraq are downstream. Ethiopia wants to put a dam up, but Egypt is downstream. Politics are having a "hay day" with this one because it's difficult to solve your own countries water problem there without severely hurting others. BIG PROBLEMS. Another problem comes from agriculture. They are using drip irrigation rather that spraying b/c alot of the water is lost to the air/wind. That helps some, but they complain alot when conservative measures MUST be made, which makes it even more difficult to govern the control of water. So why don't they take agriculture somewhere that has water? This is something to look in to. It's also difficult to create regulations when more than one country shares a water source geographically.