Groundwater Protection and Management Strategy in Jordan

Abstract

Groundwater resources are essential in Jordan that require careful planning and management in order to sustain human socio-economic development and various ecosystems. However these vital resources are under the threat of degradation by both mismanagement and over-exploitation that leads to contamination and decline of water levels. A new by-law, which specifically addresses pollution prevention and protection of water resources used for domestic purposes through appropriate land use restriction and zoning, is currently under preparation in Jordan. This law (i.e., Groundwater Management Policy) addresses the management of groundwater resources including development, protection, management, and reducing abstraction for each renewable aquifer to the sustainable rate (i.e., safe yield). Groundwater vulnerability mapping and delineation of groundwater protection zones were implemented in different areas in Jordan in cooperation between the German Bundesanstalt für Geowissenschaften und Rohstoffe (BGR) company and Ministry of Water and Irrigation. This paper presents the status of groundwater resources in Jordan and their major issues. It attempts to discuss the groundwater vulnerability and protection strategy and the impacts of over-exploitation on the groundwater aquifers in an integrated water resources management perspective.

Mitigating the Risk of Extreme Water Scarcity and Dependency: The Case of Jordan

“…Groundwater availability is assumed to be equal to the "safe yield" from renewable groundwater resources (see Section 2), which is approximately 277 × 10 nearly double the groundwater availability. Other quantitative estimates of the country-average ratio of groundwater withdrawal over safe yield range from 1.6 [30] to 1.9 [2,4]. Although other studies have also described water scarcity in Jordan as severe, our estimate is even more alarming, since we have looked at water consumption (excluding return flows) rather than withdrawals.…”

“…Groundwater availability is defined as the groundwater recharge minus the fraction of natural groundwater outflow required to sustain environmental flow requirements in the river [37]. In practice, groundwater availability in Jordan is often reported as the "safe yield" of groundwater without further clarification [2,6,23,30,42]. The FAO [41] defines "safe yield" as the amount of water (in general, the long-term average amount) that can be withdrawn from the groundwater without causing undesirable results.…”

“…The FAO [41] defines "safe yield" as the amount of water (in general, the long-term average amount) that can be withdrawn from the groundwater without causing undesirable results. Although it is a vague concept [43,44], we take reported figures on safe yield [2,6,23,30,42] as a proxy for groundwater availability, due to lack of data. We consider Jordan's blue water availability around the year 2000 as proper context for the WF estimates that relate to the period 1996-2005.…”

“…The canals that distribute water throughout Jordan are more and more polluted by salts and other agricultural runoff [4]. Pollution of groundwater is exacerbated by overpumping, which leads to a concentration of salts and other pollutants [1,17,[29][30][31][32]. Hotspots of groundwater pollution in the regions of Amman, Zarqa, and Balqa have been mapped by Alqadi et al [33].…”

Groundwater-based agriculture in arid land : the case of Azraq Basin, Jordan

“…Artificial recharge can be done directly by injecting fresh water directly into aquifers or indirectly by building dams, ponds and catchment to 'harvest' runoff during the wet season(s) (El Naqa and Al-Shayeb, 2009). This method is already implemented in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, UAE, Tunis and Qatar (Khater, 2002;UNESCO, 2014;Closas and Molle, 2016).…”