As the global community celebrated World Water Day on Sunday, many eyes were on the Middle East. The region’s ongoing water crisis is a cause for serious economic, political, and – most importantly – humanitarian concern. So it’s great to hear that, as one of many possible solutions to the ongoing scarcity, Canada’s International Development […]
Israel’s Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee). As compensation for polluting the Yarmouk River, Israel will pump freshwater from the lake into Jordan As if the regional water scarcity wasn’t bad enough already, Israel will soon begin compensating Jordan with freshwater after oil waste and sewage contaminated the shared Yarmouk River water supply. After detecting pollution […]
The “WATEC 2009” Exhibition, along with an international conference featuring a problem-solving forum for water, energy, and environmental technology issues, will be held in Israel on November 17-19, 2009. Time to book your hotels, and airplane if you are planning on coming from abroad. According to Oded Distel, director of the National Water Technology Program […]
Green Prophet’s Ilana Teitelbaum recently wrote an article about Israel’s water crisis at the Huffington Post. Rainstorms have been raging throughout Israel in the past week, after a warm and bone-dry winter. Winter, which is the only rainy season in the Middle East. There is no such thing as spring or summer rain, and in […]
For centuries, animals have been our first line of defense against toxins. A canary in a coalmine served as a living monitor for poisonous gases. Scientists used fish to test for contaminants in our water. Even with modern advances, though, it can take days to detect a fatal chemical or organism. Until now. Working in […]
Israel has officially pulled out all the stops for water conservation: Last month, Israeli officials led by Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon sought to combat the country’s urgent water crisis by changing all the mezuzot in the Water Authority offices (Jews traditionally affix a mezuzah, a piece of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah, to […]
The Middle East is pretty thirsty right now. Headlines from all over the region chronicle the increasingly serious drought conditions affecting agriculture, industry, and health. Unfortunately, new research from the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science & Technology adds reason for even more concern. In their study, “High Naturally Occurring Radioactivity in Fossil Groundwater from the Middle […]
“Water, water everywhere/Nor any drop to drink…” Those immortal words in the poem “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” by 18th century English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge only help the emphasize the reality of the water crises that countries in the Middle East and other arid regions are now facing. As annual rainfall amounts become […]
Yesterday Daniel wrote a sobering report on the increasingly serious drought conditions throughout the entire region. Israel, Jordan, the Palestinian Territories, Lebanon and Iraq have all reported water shortages that are sure to affect both the environment and international security. Sadly, Syria can also join this unfortunately long list. Syria has been suffering from a […]
Traveling through the mountains of Judea I am always struck by the stark contrast between the mountainous areas where there are villages and where there are not. The differences can be as sharp as night and day. There are even places where people are living but the land seems barren and there are other places […]
Those who have been following the Red-Dead canal proposal, and all its controversies, know that a lot is at stake. The Dead Sea is dying because natural estuaries, such as the Jordan River, Ein Gedi bottled spring water and rainwater are not making it to its shores. Politicians think that by carving a tunnel from […]
There are few environmental topics in the Middle East more controversial than the proposed Red Sea-Dead Sea Canal to revive the Dead Sea, which has the potential to cause lasting damage to the composition of the sea’s ecosystem. The multinational organization Friends of the Earth Middle East (FEME), who are working to build a peace […]
Meet Hamutal Dotan, our expert on all things culinary and delicious. Hamutal is currently working as a web editor in Toronto and aspires to be a full time writer.
It’s a drawback to being popular: Litter has become a big problem on the coast of the freshwater Kinneret lake (the Sea of Galilee). To take charge of the problem, Israel’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, the Israel Police force and the Kinneret Authority inaugurated a new environmental policing unit to clean up the coast.
Well, that depends on how you look at it… Scientists are predicting that climate change will cause upheavals in the patterns of rainfall, drought, floods, and desertification. The latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that temperatures in the Middle East have increased between 2-3 degrees Celsius in the last century, […]