Israel’s Water Authority is looking into establishing a system to move desalinated water from central Israel to lake Kinneret, in the opposite direction of the historic National Water Carrier of Israel, which has been delivering Kinneret water to the Negev since 1964. Over the past three years, due to partial droughts and natural evaporation, the Kinneret’s rate of replenishment has been reduced substantially.
An additional burden on the receding lake is the uninterrupted consumption by Jordan. In accordance with the 1994 peace treaty with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the latter will be drawing 11.2 billion gallons of water from the Kinneret – while Israel in 2016 will be drawing only about 6.6 billion gallons.
So the Kinneret continues to recede and the Water Authority realizes something’s gotta’ give. The plan, according to a report in Ha’aretz Wednesday, is to push 27 billion gallons annually into the lake from desalination plants in central Israel, raising the Kinneret water level by about 28 inches each year.
Incidentally, the total annual capacity of central Israel’s desalination plants is 150 billion gallons, making Israel the runaway king of water reclamation on planet Earth. By 2015, Israel’s desalination programs provided roughly 40% of Israel’s drinking water and it is expected to supply 70% by 2050.
The plan was presented at Tuesday’s inaugural meeting of the Water Public Forum at Tel Aviv University, which included past and present Water Authority senior officials, scientists, engineers, managers of northern water societies, and representatives of environmental groups.
Meanwhile, according to Ha’aretz, Israeli farmers upriver from the Kinneret, who had been refused an increase of 11 billion gallons annually, have begun to draw water from the Jordan River at night – endangering the environment which is already on a brink of an ecological crisis – this while Jordan continues to siphon exactly this amount for its own agriculture.