The climate crisis is driving the rise of illegal water markets in the Middle East

In Jordanian cities, green water tankers are a typical sight. The average Jordanian only has access to tap water for one and a half days every week. When taps run dry, residents and business owners pick up the phone to order water to fill tanks on their roofs or basements.

However, these trucks will not be normally shipped by the local water company. Rather, they’re operated by individual sellers who obtain water from private wells licensed to sell drinking water or, increasingly, without one. This is the story of the rise of illegal water markets in the Middle East as the climate crisis results in more intense and frequent droughts.

When the government has difficulty providing enough water

Transporting water by land is becoming increasingly vital in major cities around the world. In some parts of the world, municipal water networks have been damaged to the point that: 1 billion people are already fighting frequent interruptions in public water supplies. This led to: the spread of informal water markets. In many water-stressed countries, truck drivers, well owners, or each operate without licenses to avoid fees and conceal their activities. Are these markets alleviate or worsen water stress is an issue that research doesn’t yet have a solution to.

This is because the nature of illicit markets – they operate in secret – makes them difficult to research. However, our team in Project FUSE successfully combined models developed by economists and hydrologists to discover illicit water markets in Jordan around the world the fifth most water-scarce country in the world. To ration its limited water resources, Jordan introduced scheduled water cuts in 1987. Since then, Jordanians have been observing the average access time to public water drop from 7 to 1.5 days every week.

Water from trucks is as much as 23 times dearer

Our study shows that tankers play a much larger role in Jordan’s water supply than previously thought. One in six to seven liters in the country is transported by road. This signifies that Jordan’s cities are already severely affected by widespread water shortages.

We found that greater than half of the water utilized by businesses is currently delivered by tanker trucks, including most of the water utilized by hotels, shops and restaurants.

Water from tankers is also a key lifeline for households fighting water shortages. Most Jordanians use rooftop tanks to plug scheduled tap water outages. However, access to public water is uneven. Some neighborhoods only receive tap water for six hours every week. When storage tanks run out or there is an interruption in the supply of tap water, tanker deliveries will fill the gap.

This rescue is very expensive: households pay as much as 23 times more for water in tankers than for tap water, and the predominant reason is transport costs. Tankers travel a median of 29 kilometers to purchase water from rural wells and deliver it. This makes delivering water by road way more energy-intensive and expensive than delivering water by pipeline. We estimate that transportation alone requires a median of 18 kilowatt-hours of energy per cubic meter of water sold, which is 3 to six times more energy than seawater desalination, which itself is an energy-intensive process that produces additional carbon dioxide emissions.

Most of the tanker water sold in Jordan comes from illegal sources. The map below shows that the amount of water pumped from Jordanian aquifers for tanker supplies is 10 times larger than the amount permitted under the drilling license.

The illegal nature of these withdrawals may hamper efforts to implement groundwater protection rules. Monitoring large numbers of widely dispersed wells is difficult, and a 2015 study found that quite a few cases of landowners intimidating government employees. This is particularly problematic as groundwater levels in Jordan are rapidly declining. The total amount of water sold in tankers annually amounts to 34% of groundwater withdrawn beyond sustainable capability, exacerbating resource depletion.

Growing dependency

We expect the dependence of households and businesses in Jordan on water supplies to extend significantly in the future. The country’s population will proceed to grow rapidly its water resources are dwindling. Jordan’s unstable regional environment is exacerbating water scarcity and hampering promising solution projects, similar to the long-term plan to desalinate water from the Red Sea.

Jordan’s population is expected to double by 2050. During the same period, the country’s groundwater level is falling by roughly 1 meter per yr, and surface water resources shall be reduced by 20%. This will make it increasingly difficult for water utilities to offer enough water for everybody.

As a result, households are more depending on water supplies will increase 2.6 times by mid-century unless the urban water supply situation improves. Total sales in the water market are growing by greater than 50%, putting further pressure on the country’s groundwater resources.

Despite the growing role of water markets, many households are in danger of losing access to tanker water supplies. Currently, just about all households receiving lower than 40 liters of tap water per person per day buy water in tankers. We estimate that the price of water supplies will increase by one third by 2050 as groundwater levels decline and transport distances increase. Under this cost increase, only two-thirds of households affected by water shortages will still find a way to afford water supplies.

Access protection

Jordan is currently attempting to regain control over the unregulated transport of water from tankers closing illegal wells. This approach successfully reduced illegal water withdrawals from irrigation wells. We argue that shifting this policy to reservoir wells threatens household water access until equitable and reliable public water access is ensured for all.

Tanker deliveries will not be a perfect solution to Jordanians’ water needs. Providing businesses with most of their water supplies by road results in excess emissions. Reducing uncontrolled groundwater abstraction is an affordable policy goal. However, closing illegal tanker wells won’t reduce the unmet demand for water in cities. Instead, these policies may unintentionally hinder households’ access to a basic water supply.

Jordan’s long-term goal needs to be to enhance investments in water supply improvements with improvements to municipal water networks. This could address urban water shortages and unequal access to water as the root causes of Jordan’s water markets. AND recent research However, large-scale investments to enhance urban water supply in Jordan have shown that effectively extending tap water delivery hours is difficult to realize.

Until equitable and reliable access to water through pipelines is ensured, legalizing the provision of household water in tankers could also be a promising path to reducing uncontrolled groundwater abstraction while ensuring mandatory access to water.

The challenges of deteriorating urban water infrastructure, supply disruptions, and informal or illegal water markets will not be unique to Jordan. In Lebanon, the proportion of the population counting on tanker water supplies has recently increased from 26% to 44%, after shortening the duration of public water supplies from 49 to 22 hours every week. Dry countries around the world struggle with similar problems. By adopting policies that reconcile household access to water supplies with sustainable groundwater management, Jordan may lead by example.