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Tigris and Euphrates River Project Goals and Timeline

This version was saved 11 years, 12 months ago View current version     Page history
Saved by zadrozkk@dukes.jmu.edu
on April 4, 2012 at 12:47:09 pm
 

 

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Goals

 

Updating irrigation practices

 

      Achieving this might require restrictions to growth in agriculture and industry, and better water management practices. All three countries want to engage in a lot of agriculture, even though as an arid region this is not always a viable option. A large part of effective water management is not wasting it through outdated irrigation practices. One of the biggest sources of water loss within these countries is evaporation, and our goal is to try and change that. In Syria, thirty to forty percent of irrigation water is lost during transportation due to evaporation. A proposed solution to this problem has been to turn open air canals into pipelines. However, there is an issue of funding within Syria. An idea could be to reallocate resources, or to search for international programs that might assist them in achieving this goal.  We also propose to introduce drip irrigation wherever the technology is available within the three countries, as another problem is the amount of water wasted by using furrow and earth distribution channels. Drip irrigation provides only the amount of water needed for a plant to grow and not much more, whereas furrow and earth distribution wastes a large amount of water, which is why we want to eliminate their use as much as possible.

 

 

Inlet flow treaties between the countries

 

     Both the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers begin in Turkey, which is where a majority of the water is introduced to the two systems. Turkey uses 54.62% of the water from the basin at this initial access point by using dams and hydroelectric plants. This contributes to water shortages within Syria and Iraq.  Our goal is to negotiate with Turkey to establish equitable water allocation treaties that are acceptable to all countries. Both downstream countries believe they need more water. Measuring the water levels and water withdraws from year to year at different sites along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers will help them recognize the amount of available water in a given year, and allow them to decide what would be attainable. With this knowledge the treaty that is established would also have to be a proportionate based one that allows for adjustment as needed, such as during droughts. An ideal international treaty dealing with water use for this situation would be one that used the gathered information to proportionately distribute water between the three countries.

 

Oil for Water Trade

 

     

 

 

Time Line

 

     The lime line for the furrow irrigation, can range between one growing season, up to three years, depending on the amount of farmers that will be willing to change their irrigation practices. As for the tri-country treaties, setting up a defined timeline is difficult in this particular situation.  The three nations involved must come to a consensus on how to regulate the water flow along the rivers so that each gets their fair share. Regulations and water management practices could possibly be changed within months, to a few years, depending upon how willing each government is to cooperate and how capable they are to act. For example, right now Syria is in a position of political turmoil, due to the Arab Spring movement, making it hard for them to organize enough to act. Whereas Iraq is recently coming out of foreign occupation and is more focused on establishing a stable government and not as much on specific policies. While Turkey is the only truly stable government at the moment and they control the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, they're going to have to be the first ones to act. However they have very little initiative to act, leading to a gridlock in estimating an accurate timeline.

 

Assumptions and Constraints

 

      There are obstacles to consider before reaching these desired goals and solving the water crisis problem in the Tigris/Euphrates basin. Constraints such as deeply rooted political issues between the riparian nations limit the level of compromise we can allow for a tripartisan international treaty. The focus for eventual solutions requires the attention of such concerns and tolerance for working around these circumstances. Some assumptions, however, will be ever-changing variables which is partly what makes this problem so definitive. The unpredictability of annual flow along both rivers, due to the high possibility of droughts and heat waves make it difficult to determine future trends and planning of inlet flow quantities. It can also be considered from historical records, that this unpredictability has posed poor habits of water management in this region. Unsteady annual flow rates make it more difficult to motivate farmers and agriculturalists for more efficient technologies and updated irrigation techniques. Not just limited to agricultural, this also does not create a compelling argument for government officials to provide funding.

     What we must take from these factors is that we are working with an arid region which will always be affecting the water resources available to the basin. Water scarcity is not the problem of this region. It is the cause of the many effects that make the water management issue so difficult to solve. The riparian nations must first understand that availability of water will not fix itself unless all countries are working together and considering the basin as an entire system.

 

 


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