A Mirage turned into Reality: Israel's Successful Water Management

It is quite evident that not just India, but the whole world is struggling to find a sustainable solution to one of the major and most alarming environmental issues of the 21st century that is affecting Nature, Human beings, and Aquatic and Terrestrial organisms. The crisis is none other than the water crisis. The water stress is stuck in the throat of almost every country in the world and not many countries have become successful to fight it off. 

However, the least expected country that is more than half desert, which frequently gets hit with droughts, and is historically cursed by water stress, has not only solved the water crisis but now produces 20% more water than it needs. Israel is the country that has an inspiring story of transforming itself from a water-deficient country into a water-exporting country and India needs to take some notes. 

The Precedent

Israel is located along the eastern coastline of the Mediterranean Sea, bordered by Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. It is spread across four distinct regions – the Mediterranean coastal plain, the central hills, the Jordan Rift Valley, and the Negev most of the country has a semi-arid climate, and the Negev in the south is a desert. Within a 200km radius, annual rainfall varies from millimetres in the north to less than millimetres in the south. Extreme variations in precipitation between years are regular and multiple years of drought are not uncommon. 

Israel is one of the most water-scarce countries in the world. The country's population had increased to 8.6 million as of 2015 since the State of Israel was founded in 1948. The water demand because of Israel’s rapidly growing population outpaced the supply and natural replenishment of drinking water so much that by the year 2015, the gap between demand and available natural water supplies reached 1 Billion cubic meters (BCM). 

The Beginning 

Recovering from such drastic scenarios seemed highly unlikely, yet Israel's water management system did it by pioneering an unprecedented wealth of technological innovation and infrastructure to prevent the country from completely drying up. 

Israel’s journey towards building a sustainable water management system began with finding a solution to the country’s first and foremost issue; the uneven distribution of freshwater, an issue that was recognized by Theodor Herzl in his 1902 book Altneuland with a “fantasy plan” to transport water great distances.

This fantasy plan started taking its shape into reality soon after Israel declared its independence in 1948 as huge waves of immigrants coming into the country lacked sufficient water for drinking and farming. To cope with this, Israel’s national water company Mekorot, started constructing the National Water Carrier to pump water from the northern Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) and transfer the water from existing regional water projects to the central and southern parts of Israel. 

Source: Center for Israel Education

But after the completion of this project in 1964, 80% of the water transported was allocated for agriculture. This pointed out the fact that the National Water Carrier alone cannot satisfy both agricultural and household needs.

Fortunately, thanks to the innovative genius of Simcha Blass and his son Yeshayahu, who already had a solution in development. They came up with a drip irrigation technology in 1959. This method helped in slowly applying water directly to the roots of crops through a network of tubes, valves, and drippers. As this method avoids the evaporation of water, plants absorb 95% of the water, much more than surface irrigation, sprinkler irrigation, or flood irrigation. With the help of drip irrigation, it was possible to allocate less water to farms without compromising the agricultural output.

By the year 1965, post the completion of the National Water Carrier, Blass and his son started to distribute their technology throughout Israel and established Netafim.

Using the unusable

Despite the transportive advancements provided by the National Water Carrier and the conservational benefits of drip irrigation, the Israel water crisis did not resolve, if anything it started getting worse as both the innovations drew water solely from Israel’s very limited freshwater resources, which were being pumped faster than they could be replenished naturally. 

Israeli engineers started realizing that the problem cannot be solved only by conserving available freshwater resources but also by taking advantage of the water resources that were considered unusable, such as treated municipal wastewater and stormwater. 

In the year 1985, Israel started sending treated, recycled wastewater with the help of the National Water Carrier to farms, eventually reducing the gap between consumer demand and available water. 

By 2015, Israel's water management had already been successful in treating and recycling 86% of its wastewater for agricultural purposes, leading the water towards wastewater management. In the same year, Spain started recycling 17% of its wastewater. 

Source: Global Water Intelligence

Israel’s tertiary treatment processes are capable of recycling and cleaning wastewater to near drinking-quality levels before reaching crops to avoid contamination. 

Desalination

The art of desalination was one of the major factors contributing to transforming Israel from being a water-deficient country to becoming a water-rich country. Desalination is the process of treating seawater through various processes and making it potable. Israel’s long-term investment in desalination apparatus and technology paid off and has helped the country to become a global leader in the use of this technology. 

The world’s biggest reverse-osmosis desalination plant is installed in Israel's water management system due to which almost 80% of the country’s drinking water comes from desalination.

Source: Watertechnology.net

However, desalination is not an economical technique and could potentially raise the cost of water.  But with the help of the advancement of this technique, Israel’s water management system was able to bring down the prices of water to a third of what it used to cost in the 1990s. 

Creating Awareness of Water Conservation

Israelis started becoming more conscious of water scarcity when the Israel Water Management Authority launched awareness campaigns via TV, radio, and the internet urging the public to save water. 

One such campaign was by targeting children through a series of cartoon television programs that taught the importance of water and how to save it with simple means, nurturing generations of conscientious citizens. 

Soon, water conservation became popular in Israel and due to this campaigning, water consumption in households fell by 18%. 

This combination of high-tech solutions and national cultural awareness truly distinguishes Israel’s water conservation program from so many others. 

Hope

With over 60 crore facing extreme water stress and nearly 2 lakh people dying each year due to polluted water, the task in the hand of the Indian Government is by no means small. It is going to be the biggest challenge but Israel has presented hope, that it's not impossible.