CityReads│Let There Be Water: Israel’s Water Solutions

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LetThere Be Water: Israel’s Water Solutions 

How has Israel transformed from a water-deprived to a water-rich country? 

Seth M. Siegel, 2015. Let there be water: Israel’s solution for a water-starved world, New York, NY, St. Martin’s Press.

Sources: David Rodman (2018) Let there be water: Israel’s solution for a water-starved world,Israel Affairs, 24:1, 197-198, DOI: 10.1080/13537121.2017.1398456

https://mfa.gov.il/mfa/innovativeisrael/greenisrael/pages/israel-a-leader-in-water-management-22-march-2018.aspx

Picture source: Israeli supermodel Bar Rafaeli in the 2009 water conservation campaign video called “Israel is drying out”

The Land of Israel has traditionally been called ‘a land of milk and honey’. But for thousands of years, the history of the Land of Israel has been influenced by the scarcity of water. Israel has been quite dry and often plagued by severe drought conditions. The ancient nation of Israel faced many cases of water shortages and found creative solutions; one of the most famous stories in the Bible is that of Moses drawing water from a rock during the Israelites’ 40-year journey back to Israel from Egypt through the arid desert.

Moses drawing water from the rock, Joachim Wtewael, 1624

Sixty percent of Israel is desert, and the rest is semiarid.  Renewable fresh natural water came from the mountain and coastal aquifers and the only body of freshwater, the Sea of Galile. Freshwater resources in the form of rivers, lakes, streams, springs and aquifers are few and far between ‒ so few and far between that Israel and its Arab neighbors actually engaged in border warfare during the 1960s over access to these resources.

In the modern era, as one couldn’t rely on the old “technology” Moses used, Israel needed to create new solutions to address water scarcity in order to survive -and indeed thrive. In the early years after Israel was established, the population grew rapidly with the influx of immigrants. As the tiny country struggled with a significant water shortage, its leaders launched an initiative to close the gap between demand and the available renewable fresh natural waterin the country.

Today, however, the water situation in Israel has changed dramatically for the better. During the past couple of decades, Israel has made itself into a ‘water superpower’ that not only has the resources to meet all of its own needs, but also the resources to supply its water-poor Arab neighbors, namely the Jordanians and Palestinians. Considering its population increase and economic growth in Israel, the transformation from water shortage to water surplus is all the more remarkable. Since its founding in 1948, the country’s population has grown more than tenfold, one of the world’s fastest growth rates in the post–World War II era. Israel started poor, but now has one of the world’s most rapidly growing economies. Furthermore, this revolutionary turn around has been accomplished quietly, with none of the publicity that has accompanied the recent discovery and exploitation of the immense natural gas fields along the Jewish state’s Mediterranean coastline.

How has Israel transformed from a water-deprived to a water-rich country? Water expert and environmental activist Seth Siegel relates the story of Israel’s transformation from a water-deprived to a water-rich state in a very accessible and engaging book, Let there be water: Israel’s solution for a water-starvedworld. His pains taking research, which rests heavily on interviews and documents, lays out the three main processes behind the Jewish state’s triumph over water scarcity: conservation, recycling and desalination. Collectively,they are insulating Israel against water shortages at a time when climate change is rapidly shrinking freshwater resources around the world to the grave detriment of many countries.

Conservation

Israeli society has always been infused with a strong conservation ethic with respect to water consumption. The inclination of ordinary Israelis not to squander the state’s water resources has been regularly reinforced, he notes, by forward-looking government policies, such as instituting an ingenious pricing system that serves as a deterrent against frivolous water usage, as well as by close government supervision and control of actual water usage. Furthermore, Siegel points out that the conservation ethic has also prompted Israeli scientists and engineers to think creatively about how to make the most of Israel’s water resources.

Of the many Israeli technological advances in the field of water conservation ‒ and Israelhas always been a world leader in this field ‒ perhaps none has been of greater significance than the development of drip irrigation. This method of watering crops, which relies on hoses with tiny holes to drip water directly onto plant roots, not only saves substantial quantities of water incomparison to other methods of irrigation, but also leads to substantially higher crop yields.

The most common form of irrigation was flood irrigation. Fields or their furrows would be inundated with water, or, in the case of orchards, trenches would be dug around the base of the tree, and the trench would be flooded. The majority of the flood-irrigation water evaporates or drains uselessly into the soil before it can be absorbed by the roots. In general, more than fifty percent of flood-irrigation water is wasted. The alternative to flood irrigation at that time—different varieties of sprinkler irrigation—suffered from similar problems. About one-third of the water is lost with sprinkler irrigation. Irrigatinga plant drop by drop limits evaporation and delivers the water that the plant needs directly at its roots. The water savings are significant—only fourpercent of the water is lost to evaporation or unnecessary absorption into the soil.

On average, drip irrigation saved fifty to sixty percent of the water customarily used. But the second—entirely serendipitous—discovery would prove to be even more important than the amount of water saved: In every experiment Blass conducted, the yield from crops watered with drip irrigation was higher than with other known irrigation techniques. With no additional acreage to be planted, the enhanced harvest was akin to getting free crops with no extra water used. Even farms in water-rich areas would benefit from irrigating plants with drip irrigation. It was an invention with the potential to change theworld of agriculture.

Drip irrigation itself doesn’t give people more water for drinking or for sanitation. But worldwide, agriculture uses about seventy percent of our water. Only ten percent is used for drinking, cooking, and keeping clean. If a country can reduce its agriculture water use by just fifteen percent—an easy goal with drip irrigation—that extra water would more than double what people have available to them.

Recycling

Conservationby itself, however, would never have been sufficient to overcome the Jewish state’s water deficit. Recycling has played a major role here, too. Israel captures, treats and reuses more than 85% of its waste water, including raw sewage. Spain, the second largest recycler of water, reuses a mere 25% of its waste water. Though recycled water is not suitable for human consumption, it isfit for agricultural and industrial use, and has also helped to rehabilitate the natural landscape.

Desalination

The large-scale introduction of desalination technology, which converts salt- water into fresh water, has put the last nail into the coffin of Israel’s water woes. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Israel has built a number of desalination plants along its Mediterranean coastline. These plants have pumped abundant quantities of fresh water into Israel’s expanding cities, towns and farming communities. Israel’s experiment with desalination has been so successful that it is now sharing its technology with countries around the world.

Israel Desalination Engineering team developed two new energy-efficient approaches to desalination, both of which remain in use around the world today. The first idea, called Mechanical Vapor Compression, or MVC. It is reliable but very expensive. Research around MVC, though, led to a second approach, Multi-Effect Distillation, or MED. Israeli MED used less energy than any other heat-based desalination process. In a heat-intensive process, it was a giant leap forward in reducing costs in the then still evolving field of desalination.

Seawater is a mixture of pure water, salt, and other minerals. When seawater goes through reverse osmosis, the water is pushed through a membrane with the pure water sent in one direction and the salt molecules in another. Due to the use of the RO membrane, the water wasn’t just the highest quality water to be foundin Israel in terms of cleanliness, low salinity, and high clarity; it also turned out to be about fifty percent cheaper.

The revolutionary nature of desalination evokes an earlier agriculture revolution.“It became a paradigm shift when man could grow his own food. When we began desalination and reusing waste water, it was a paradigm shift. Today, we are in a period like the dawn of agriculture. Prehistoric man had to go where the foodwas. Now, agriculture is an industry. Until recently, we had to go where thewater was. But, no longer”.

After decades of slow progress, desalination is increasingly being used to provide drinking water around the globe. Costs for processing salt water for drinking water have dropped, but it remains an expensive option and one that creates environmental problems that must be addressed.

Let there be light also portrays the myriadways that Israel has assisted other countries in alleviating their water problems. Israel not only has assisted its Jordanian and Palestinian neighbors to improve the quantity and quality of their fresh water resources, but also has upgraded the water systems of many developing countries through both public initiatives and private ventures. And, lately, Israel has begun to share its expertise with developed countries as well. A fascinating discussion of the water cooperation between Israel and the US State of California illustrates this growing trend

Let there be water shows how a small country overcame what has now become a most vexing (but solvable) environmental problem. The world should think of Israel as a laboratory, but also as an inspiration.

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