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ENHANCING WATER
SECURITY IN THE
MIDDLE EAST
2
ENHANCING WATER SECURITY IN THE
MIDDLE EAST
Al Sharq Task Force on the MENA Water Security
Hussein A. Amery Marwa Daoudy
Mohammed Mahmoud Hilmi S. Salem
Neda Zawahri Mohammad Al-Saidi
AL SHARQ FORUM BOOK
March 2023
Task Force Coordinator: Sinan Hatahet
Task Force Assistant: Rawan Hammoud
3
This book is the product of the MENA Water Security task force organized by
Al Sharq Strategic Research between March 2022 to February 2023.
The task force team was constituted of:
Hussein A. Amery, Professor at Colorado School of Mines, the academic
head and the book editor of the task force
Sinan Hatahet, the task force coordinator at Al Sharq Strategic Research
Rawan Hammoud, the task force assistant at Al Sharq Strategic Research
Mehmet Emin Cengiz, research fellow at Al Sharq Strategic Research
Contributors:
Marwa Daoudy, Associate Professor at Georgetown University
Mohammed Mahmoud, Director of the Water and Climate Program at the
Middle East Institute
Hilmi S. Salem, Professor, Sustainable Development Research Institute
Neda Zawahri, Associate Professor at Cleveland State University
Mohammad Al-Saidi, Associate Professorat Qatar University
Al Sharq Forum takes no institutional or partisan positions on policy issues. The views and
opinions expressed in this publication belong to author(s) and do not necessarily represent
those of Al Sharq Forum.
Copyright © 2023 by Al Sharq Forum
All rights reserved
Art design&Layout: Jawad Abazeed
Printed in Turkey
This publication may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form without prior
permission from Al Sharq Forum. If any extract from the publication is used, the author(s)
and Al Sharq Forum should be credited.
Preface / Sinan Hatahet 5
Chapter One: Enhancing Water Security in the Middle
East / Hussen A. Amery 13
Chapter Two: Water and Climate Challenges in the Middle East:
A Human Security Perspective / Marwa Daoudy 51
Chapter Three: The Nile River: Modern Solutions for Evolving
Challenges / Mohammed Mahmoud 91
Chapter Four: Potential Solutions for the Water Conflict Between
Palestinians and Israelis / Hilmi S. Salem 123
Chapter Five: Averting A Humanitarian Crisis Along the Euphrates
and Tigris Rivers / Neda Zawahri 189
Chapter Six: Assessing Desalination Governance and the Promise
of Technology in the Arabian Peninsula/ Mohammad Al-Saidi 225
Contributors 264
About Al Sharq Strategic Research 269
Content
225
Assessing Desalination Governance and the
Promise of Technology in the Arabian Peninsula
Mohammad Al-Saidi
Chapter Six
226
Abstract: Desalination is expected to grow across the Middle East and
North Africa due to increased water scarcity. The cost of desalinated water
has decreased signiicantly over the last decades, but it has not reflected
the mounting environmental impacts of desalination. Desalination can
result in signiicant negative impacts on the environment, such as harmful
emissions and the destruction of terrestrial and marine ecosystems.
Sustainable desalination should address environmental problems across
the entire lifecycle of desalination plants, and embed desalination
activities within a larger good governance view. This chapter maps out
solutions and best practices relevant for the desalination industry using
the case study of the Arabian Peninsula. It provides three main solution
categories for making desalination sustainable, aordable, and safe.
First, technological remedies to address the environmental impacts of
desalination should go hand in hand with environmental regulation.
Solutions related to lowering pollution, waste and marine impacts of
desalination require clear and enforceable regulation frameworks that
include thresholds, standards, reporting mechanisms and monitoring
plans. Second, providing aordable desalination requires collaboration
between the state, the private sector, and civil society. The private sector
can share some of the desalination costs through joint ventures with
state companies. Civil society and donor organizations can provide
technical knowledge and aid programs in order to expand small-scale
desalination for remote communities. Third, safe desalination requires
the protection of desalination infrastructure as critical assets. This
includes paying attention to the operational security of desalination
plants and developing contingency plans. Related to this, regional
227
cooperation through knowledge sharing and joint action to mitigate the
cross-country impacts of desalination activities is important for regions
such as the Arabian Gulf. Overall, sustainable desalination is a multi-actor
task that should integrate the perspective of water policymakers with
that of desalination plants’ managers and operators. While desalination
managers prioritize issues related to their technical performance,
policymakers should encourage more collaboration and co-development
of environmentally friendly desalination. Public leadership is important
for lowering the desalination cost, investing in green desalination
technologies, providing clear institutional frameworks, and improving
awareness about water conservation in collaboration with civil society.
1. Introduction: The age of (sustainable) desalination?
Desalination activities have grown tremendously in the last decades,
with now ca. 16.000 plants in 177 countries existing, mainly for satisfying
municipal water demands (Jones et al., 2019). The drivers behind the
increase in desalination activities are related to the availability of
desalination technology and increased water scarcity, as billions of
people are already living under water scarce conditions (Bennett, 2013;
Pistocchi et al., 2020). Desalination technologies have also become
economically feasible for many countries due to the decline in costs
and increase in water recovery over the older technologies used in
past decades. This cost decrease is mainly related to improved energy
recovery technologies, operational innovations, and the dissemination
of membrane desalination technologies – especially reverse osmosis
(or RO) and nanoiltration (NF), (Bennett, 2013). While the rise of RO
228
technologies has signiicantly decreased costs, these costs still vary
from one plant to another depending on the deployed technologies,
energy use and water type (Karagiannis and Soldatos, 2008; Pinto and
Marques, 2017). Desalination is cost-eective in many places because
many of the environmental impacts of desalination are not adequately
internalized through environmental regulation (Pinto and Marques,
2017). Sustainable desalination has become even more important
because some new technologies can also lead to additional negative
environmental impacts. For example, RO achieves higher water recovery
ratios and lower energy use, but discharges more dense brines than the
Multi-Stage Flash (MSF) or Multi-Eect Distillation (MED) technologies
frequently used in the Arab Gulf countries (Jones et al., 2019; Morillo et
al., 2014).
In the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA), despite requiring
signiicant inancial investments, valuable coastal land, and energy,
desalinated water has become a vital water source due to aridity and
increased water usage (Barau and Al Hosani, 2015; Heck et al., 2017).
By far, the Middle East holds the largest share of desalination capacity
worldwide, with the region of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) leading
desalination activities. Some 29% of global desalination capacity stem
from the three GCC countries of Saudi Arabia (15.5%), UAE (10.1%) and
Kuwait (3.7%) (Jones et al., 2019). Despite the cost and environmental
impacts of desalination, the dissemination of desalination in the Middle
East is increasingly seen as a popular managerial-technical ix for
water supply problems. There is little focus on sustainable pathways
229
to achieve good governance of desalination activities in the region.
Using the Gulf region as a case study, the aim of this contribution is to
highlight emergent sustainable solutions to common problems facing
the growth of the desalination industry in the MENA region while
critically reflecting on desalination as a panacea for the region. This
contribution irst presents the case of the desalination expansion (both
vertically across countries, regions and sub-regions, and horizontally
across use sectors). Later, it introduces common challenges in the areas
of a) environmental impacts of desalination (mainly the two issues of
brine management, and desalination emissions); b) aordability and
inance; and c) supply security (e.g., risks to coastal infrastructure).
While presenting these challenges in the Arabian Peninsula, the paper
explains solutions and relevant case experiences, e.g., the regulation of
brine disposal/discharge, solar desalination, and public-private inance
schemes through Independent Water and Power providers or resilience-
based supply management in desalination. Such solutions can move the
increasing desalination activities in the region towards more inancial
and environmental sustainability.
2. Background: Desalination as a techno-managerial ix for the
MENA region
The Middle East and North African region currently accounts for ~48%
of the total global desalinated water produced daily which is estimated
at around 95 million cubic meter per day (25 billion US Gallons per
day) (Jones et al., 2019). For the GCC countries, desalination as a water
supply option represents an old solution for water scarcity and rising
230
demands. The irst desalination plants were built on the Gulf coast in
the 1950s, with the number of plants increasing steadily since then (Le
Quesne et al., 2021). Nowadays, the desalination sector is providing a
reliable supply of good-quality water for domestic use in all GCC states.
Table 1 provides some indicators on current GCC desalination capacity.
It is noticeable that thermal desalination technologies (MSF and MED)
are still strongly represented in the Gulf, particularly MSF technology.
At the same time, RO is the main technology for newly constructed
desalination plants in the Gulf and worldwide. There has been a great
expansion in the use of RO technology over the last decades. While
~84% of desalinated water worldwide was produced using thermal
technologies in 1984, this number declined to ~50% in 2000 and only
~30% currently (Jones et al., 2019). Despite the higher energy eficiency
of RO – and the less expensive operations, the Gulf countries still rely on
thermal technologies due to their abundance of fossil fuels and the high
salinity of feed water, which limits the operations and water recovery in
RO desalination. GCC countries furthermore preferred MSF plants due
to factors such as ease of operation, reliability, and use as cogeneration
plants (producing both water and electricity) (Parmigiani, 2015). However,
with the rise of environmental concerns and the advancement of RO
in terms of energy eficiency and membranes’ reliability, and thus the
decrease of desalination costs, GCC countries have started to rely more
on membrane-based technologies, mainly RO for now.
Table 1. Desalination indicators for GCC countries
231
Indicator
Bahrain Kuwait Oman Qatar Saudi Arabia United Arab
Emirates
Total Renewable Water Resources
Per Capita (Cubic Meter Per Capita
Per Year) (2013–2017) 1
84 5 312 26 76 16
Desalinated water per capita (Cubic
Meter Per Capita Per Day) (2016) 2
0.47 0.48 0.17 0.59 0.17 0.66
Annual freshwater withdrawals
(Billion Cubic Meters per year) (2017)
1
0.2 0.8 1.6 0.3 21.2 2.6
Produced desalinated water (Billion
Cubic Meter per year) (2016) 2
0.24 0.71 0.28 0.56 1.95 2.0
% of desalination capacity produced
from thermal desalination (only
MSF and MED) (2017) 3
82% 100% 94% 99% 50% 91%
% of desalination capacity produced
from membrane-based desalination
(only RO) (2017) 3
18% 0% 6% <1% 50% 9%
Sources: 1 FAO Aquastat, https://www.fao.org/aquastat/en/; 2 GCC Stat, Water Statistics Report 2016,
https://www.gccstat.org/images/gccstat/docman/publications/water_statistics_1.pdf; 3 GCC Stat retrieved
from Dawoud et al. (2020)
232
The rise of desalination technology as a viable and signiicant water
supply option throughout the MENA region can be witnessed in two
main trends. As earlier-mentioned, GCC countries have for decades
relied on desalination almost entirely with regard to domestic water
supply. First, besides these countries, major desalination plants are
expanding to other countries in the Mashreq and Maghreb regions. For
example, Algeria is one of the irst North African countries to invest in
desalination. In 2001, it launched a program to invest 14 billion USD in
43 desalination plants, some of which were indeed built, giving Algeria
one of the biggest desalination capacities in the MENA region, with an
overall capacity of over 2.2. million cubic meter a day (Djoher, 2020).
Since 2005, Israel has developed a well-functioning desalination sector,
supplying almost 50% of total freshwater consumption and almost all
domestic consumption (Bar-Nahum et al. 2022; Teschner et al. 2013).
Desalination plants are also being built in countries with relative high
water abundance, such as Egypt and Morocco. Morocco’s ambitious
desalination program dates back to the mid-1990s, but it has expanded
signiicantly over the last decade (El-Ghzizela et al., 2021). Egypt has also
committed itself to build more desalination plants – up to 17 by the
mid-2020s with a combined capacity of 2.8 million cubic meters per day.
Its current desalination capacity in 2011 stands at ~0.8 million cubic
meters per day, and it should increase to ~6.4 million by 2050 (Werr,
2021). Even in water-scarce countries, desalination is being considered
as a solution to solve water shortages, e.g., for supplying water in Jordan
through the planned 1.8 billion USD Al-Aqqba Desalination Plant or the
233
many plans by international organizations for large-scale plants to supply
major cities in Yemen, such as Sana’a and Taiz.
Second, desalination has expanded into new sectors beyond the domestic
water supply. In agriculture, it is increasingly being used to remediate
the current water use (desalination of the increasingly salty groundwater)
and to providing new supply – seawater desalination. Desalinating salty
groundwater used for agriculture through water treatment applications
has become relatively common in the GCC region (Batarseh et al., 2021).
Farmers have been using this groundwater for irrigation free of charge, and
they now need to pay for any onsite desalination activities. It is possible
to desalinate brackish water and make it available for use in agriculture
through the widely applied method of nanoilteration (Tian et al. 2021).
Seawater is also being considered for irrigation, such as in Morocco where
a large-scale desalination plant in the coastal city of Agadir (producing
up to 0.45 million cubic meter per day) will supply both drinking water
and water for an irrigation system in the Ctouka plain (El-Ghzizela et al.,
2021). One reason for the expansion of the desalination to other sectors
(beyond domestic supply) is the decrease of cost in recent years, reaching
0.5 USD per cubic meters and 1-2 USD including transport and distribution
(Parmigiani, 2015). Often for farmers in the MENA region, paying the
full price of desalinated water can make their production uneconomic.
Therefore, using desalinated water for irrigation will depend on the
farming economics of certain crops, and subsidies (for either the water
price or directly to certain farmers) might be necessary in some cases.
234
While desalination is on the rise worldwide, awareness about the
negative impacts of desalination activities is slowly increasing. However,
desalination remains largely perceived as a panacea for solving water
supply problems at reasonable costs. These costs are often discussed in
terms of the one-o expenditure in installing the desalination plants and
the operational costs, mainly related to the use of energy and chemicals.
Desalination is therefore seen as a depoliticized, techno-managerial
issue (Swyngedouw and Williams, 2016). It can also reinforce neoliberal
ideas about water governance solutions, i.e. the primacy of supply-
side solutions through commercial technologies over demand-side
solutions (Fragkou and Budds, 2020). While the pitfalls of desalination
are often seen as being related to aordability and some environmental
impacts (mainly the brine issue or carbon emissions), recent academic
literature demonstrates more wide-ranging consequences. Desalination
is changing water control and water governance notions, and maybe
promoting in the long-run the primacy of technologies and the private
sector (Teschner et al., 2013; Williams, 2018). As this contribution will
argue in the next section, desalination should also be embedded in
wider frameworks related to sustainable development and good water
governance.
3. Towards sustainable desalination: obstacles and emergent
remedies
3.1 Common challenge synopsis
This chapter highlights some sustainable and policy-relevant directions
for desalination in the MENA region, while focusing on experiences of
235
Gulf countries. It has already mentioned how drivers have increased
interest in desalination as a techno-managerial solution. These drivers
include socio-economic and environmental changes (e.g., economic
growth, scarcity, and the need for resilient supplies), and techno-
economic feasibility (e.g., cost reductions mainly due to membranes’
advancement). In the case of the Gulf, other drivers will be discussed
in this chapter, namely requirements for political control (i.e.,
preference for large-scale, centralized, and supply-side remedies). While
desalination is on the rise, this chapter argues for a wider perspective
on desalination challenges and for embedding them within a larger
understanding of good governance of water supply. This is in line with
the emerging body of knowledge promoting neglected issues such as
desalination governance (Barau and Al Hosani, 2015; Mumme et al., 2017;
van der Merwe et al., 2013), regulation (Navarro Barrio et al., 2021), and
public control (Campero and Harris, 2019; Haddad, 2013).
Figure 1 shows desalination as embedded in a wider good governance
task. The aim of desalination good governance is to foster the
implementation of certain normative principles underlying the modern
concept of sustainable development. Al-Saidi (2017a) explains how many
of these good governance principles are guiding contemporary water
management instruments used for solving local water problems. While
these principles are often applied to (integrated) water management
in general, they can steer desalination because it is a multi-actor and
cross-sectoral task (Compagnucci and Spigarelli, 2018). Some of the
236
selected principles explained in Figure 1 are speciic to the desalination
challenge, while the mentioned issues will be highlighted in the next
sections. The overall argument is that desalination is a broader water
governance challenge with environmental regulation at the heart of
making desalination more sustainable. As this chapter will show, there
is a wide range of often context-speciic solutions to tackle desalination
issues ranging from brine management solutions, renewable energy
use, participation of private actors, the level of centralization, taris,
and resilience-based strategies.
Figure 1. Desalination management as a (good) governance task
(NOTE: igure to be redesigned professionally)
237
3.2 Low-impact desalination: mitigating environmental problems
Environmental impacts are plenty and can be caused before, during,
or after the operation of a plant, summarized together with remedies,
in Table 2. Therefore, low-impact desalination needs to consider and
solve environmental problems of desalination across the life cycle of a
desalination plant (Mannan et al., 2019), within which one-o impacts
associated with plant construction such as pollution and environmental
damage related to the use of land and materials should be considered
(Zhou et al., 2014). While these impacts are common to other industries,
they can be addressed through compensation or minimization
strategies. Similarly, the decommissioning of a desalination plant
leaves waste materials and often degraded lands and coasts. In case
no new desalination plants are built on the same site – which is the
regular practice (Ziolkowska, 2015a), sound waste disposal strategies
and additional measures such as the rehabilitation of costal reefs (e.g.,
through artiicial ones) and soil should be undertaken (Seyfried et al.,
2019).
There are also other environmental impacts typical to other industries,
such as noise or air pollution and harmful gases during the operation of
a desalination plant. These impacts can be mitigated through the use of
site-speciic measures to reduce noise, improve energy recovery, or use
renewable energy to lower emissions (Ogunbiyi et al., 2021; Panagopoulos,
2021). The remaining category of environmental impact is speciic to
the desalination industry and centers around the water intake and
brine disposal during the desalination operations. The impacts include
238
various forms of disruptions or destruction of aquatic systems during
water intake and several threats arising from the temperature, turbidity,
or salinity of the disposed brine (Hosseini et al., 2021; Panagopoulos and
Haralambous, 2020).
For a sustainable and low-impact desalination, it is important to tackle
the rising environmental problems associated with the desalination
industry. Considering the urgency of providing additional water
supplies, many countries have decided to ignore or delay action on
environmental damage, or to only focus on more serious impacts such
as those related to greenhouse gas emissions or brine disposal (Elsaid
et al., 2020; Panagopoulos and Haralambous, 2020). For brine disposal,
there are a wide range of treatment and disposal methods reviewed in
recent academic literature (Bello et al., 2021; Khan and Al-Ghouti, 2021).
For example, some types of brine can be used for other purposes such as
hydrotherapy, wetland regeneration, or saline agriculture, although the
use of the more concentrated (e.g. more salty) brine from RO remains
dificult (Rodríguez-DeLaNuez et al. 2012). The brine can also be “safely”
discharged into deep wells or speciied surface areas (discharge zones).
For RO brine, it is possible also possible to minimize the impacts through
several treatment and disposal technologies, although these technologies
can increase the energy requirements of desalination (Amy et al. 2017).
All of these applications for reuse and safe disposal come with their own
potential impacts on the receiving sectors and environments, and often do
not eliminate the brine problem. Research and technology development
239
is therefore seeking ways to minimize or eliminate the brine through Zero-
Liquid-Discharge (ZLD), although this idea should be rather understood as
an ultimate – but still quite costly and dificult – goal for future desalination
technologies (Ihsanullah et al., 2021; Khan and Al-Ghouti, 2021). Materials
recovery (i.e., minerals, salt, and precious materials) can help transform
desalination towards the ZLD aim (Al-Absi et al., 2021), although the current
processes are largely not economic or commercial (Ihsanullah et al., 2021).
Currently, the more common approach is to treat the brine before discharge
through dierent methods such as dilution (relatively cost-eective and
commonly used), evaporation ponds (a common but more expensive
method), disinfection (rather as a pre-treatment step), or as adsorption
(rather novel and not widely used).
While the desalination debate has so far focused on technology or
environmental regulation through water quality thresholds, punishments
or incentives is the missing link for making desalination sustainable.
Environmental impacts such as the brine problem are receiving increasing
attention, particularly in regions such as the Gulf, where brine production
in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar accounts for 55% of the global brine
production (Jones et al., 2019). Nonetheless, the brine is often disposed of
without any remediation in the Gulf and elsewhere. New desalination plants
might apply some forms of disinfection and dilution before discharge. As
the important missing link in the debates on sustainable desalination,
environmental regulation should be more explicit and enforceable. The
current best practice of environmental regulation is to mandate the use of
240
Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) with speciied requirements
for desalination activities. These EIAs should also include Environmental
Monitoring Plans (EMPs), and additional emergency protocols, which
together specify thresholds, (emergency) practices and reporting
procedures. This approach (EIA with EMPs) is followed in some countries
such as the USA, Spain, Australia, Chile, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, but with
dierent standards and levels of enforcement (Sola et al., 2021). Even
without mandating EMPs, it is also possible to enforce certain quality
standard or thresholds, and to assign monitoring tasks to regulatory
agencies. In Kuwait, for example, the Kuwait Environment Public
Authority assumes the tasks of monitoring water quality and compliance
with thresholds (Hosseini et al., 2021). However, in the MENA region,
environmental regulation of desalination is quite weak, with largely no
EMPs observed in Tunisia, UAE, Oman, and Algeria (Sola et al., 2021), while
the GCC countries lack clear and enforceable regulatory frameworks
(Amma and Ashraf, 2020; Barau and Al Hosani, 2015; Hosseini et al., 2021;
van der Merwe et al., 2013).
Standards (i.e. required practices or processes) and thresholds (i.e.
minimum levels or points required) represent classic instruments for
environmental regulation, namely command-and-control regulation (i.e.
setting rules and monitoring or enforcing them). There are also other
options through economic regulation, which means providing incentives
for desalination plants to optimize their costs, including the costs of
environmental externalities. Economic regulations means monitoring
241
the costs of the desalination plants and mandating performance-
improving measures (including environmental performance) such as
benchmarking (comparison with other plants), yardstick instruments
(awarding a inancial incentive based on the relative performance), and/
or regulating the allowed price for desalinated water based on the cost
function of the plant. However, these instruments (often implemented
through independent regulators) are not widely used in the desalination
industry.
242
Type of impact Impact category Issues Remedies
One-o
industrial
impacts
Plant
construction
Pollution and
environmental damage
to terrestrial and marine
ecosystems
Careful site selection, compensation
of arable land; minimization of
associated waste
Plant de-
construction
Industrial waste; damage
to artiicial reefs
Waste disposal strategies;
rehabilitation of soil and marine
ecosystems through artiicial reefs
Continuous
industrial
impacts
Energy
consumption
Air pollutions; greenhouse
gases
Energy eficiency measures; energy
recovery; use of renewables;
modernization of plants
Noise pollution Impacts of vibration and
noise on humans and
marine organisms
Noise minimization strategies
through plant design
Continuous
desalination-
speciic impacts
Water intake Disruption and damage to
aquatic ecosystems
Site-selection of water intake away
from productive ecosystems; use of
barriers and bypasses for marine
organisms
Water disposal Damage to aquatic
ecosystems mainly from
the temperature, turbidity
and salinity of the brine;
damage to other receiving
environments of the
desalination brine, e.g.,
groundwater or soil
Reuse in other sectors; safe
disposal; several brine minimization
strategies towards materials’
recovery and Zero-Liquid-
Discharge (ZLD); brine treatment
using methods such as dilution,
evaporation, disinfection or
adsorption
Table 2. Environmental impact categories of desalination and solutions
243
3.3 Accessible desalination: aordability and participation
The costs of desalination, namely capital costs plus operational and
maintenance costs, represent a key issue that can drive or restrain local
desalination. Closely related to this issue is the question of desalination
inance (i.e., who owns assets, pays the costs and retrieves them from the
consumer) and ultimately the desalination water taris. The parameters
aecting the desalination costs are plenty, and can change depending on
factors such as the scale of the plant, the type of treatment technology,
energy input, and any environmental regulations (Ziolkowska, 2015b).
Reviews of desalination costs provide varying ranges of costs, although
small-scale desalination plants seem to have higher costs per unit of the
produced water due to the lack of economies of scale (Al-Karaghouli and
Kazmerski, 2013; Ziolkowska, 2015b).
Energy seems to be one of the key optimization points for determining
desalination costs since it can account for 50% of the produced water cost
(Al-Karaghouli and Kazmerski, 2013). In the case of remote or rural areas
without access to national grids, renewable-energy-coupled desalination
systems are recommended although the production costs of these
systems is still much higher than conventional desalination systems.
Particularly for small-scale systems, i.e., below 100 cubic meter per day,
costs can range – depending on treatment technology and renewable
energy source – between 1 and 16 USD per cubic meter (Al-Karaghouli
and Kazmerski, 2013). Small-scale desalination using RO systems are the
most economic systems with the cost estimated at up to 3 USD per
244
cubic meter (Al-Karaghouli and Kazmerski, 2013). It is rather dificult to
imagine that remote and often-poor areas in the MENA region, which
previously depended on free groundwater, can aord to pay 10, 5 or even
2 USD per cubic meter for small-scale desalination.
The current economics of seawater desalination will probably hinder a
wide and bottom-up participation in desalination activities, especially
given that the current cost estimates often do not include the costs of
environmental externalities. Therefore, desalination is recommended to
be one of several supply options, while, for remote areas, the desalination
of brackish groundwater can be more cost-eective than long-distance
transport of desalinated water (Ziolkowska, 2015b). This is true for the
severe cases of water shortages in large Yemeni cities such as Taiz or
Sana’a. In fact, transporting designated water from coastal areas to the
northern highlands seems “unrealistic” and “not viable,” although this
option is still debated due to the desperate water situation (Varisco,
2019; Weiss, 2015). In any case, some form of public support to make
inal water taris aordable is highly needed as pro-poor orientation
has been a key objective of water pricing policies in Yemen (Al-Saidi,
2017b).
In the Gulf countries, desalination has often been rendered through
large-scale desalination plants with increasingly more participation from
the private sector. New desalination plants are built by independent
(water and) power producers (IPPs or IWPP) established as public-
245
private-partnerships (PPPs) with state companies owning some of the
assets. In Qatar, for instance, the Qatar Electricity and Water Company
(the national company for water and electricity production) was involved
– often as a majority shareholder – in several joint venture desalination
companies. Together, they built new plants in Um al Houl (ca. 620,000
cubic meter per day, commissioned in 2016) or Ras Laan A, B and C
(the three stations producing a total ca. 741 cubic meter per day, and
commissioned between 2004-2011). These new companies sell water to
a single buyer (SB) (namely Kahramaa which represents the national
company for water supply) through long-term purchase agreements,
in which the new companies receive buy-in-guarantees and subsidized
fuel costs from the state. This PPP-model is popular in the Gulf and
elsewhere in the MENA region since it allows for cost-sharing, and
the participation of private sector, while maintaining state control
and providing new lucrative jobs for the local population (Al-Saidi,
2020a; Tsai, 2018). The state remains highly involved in the provision
of desalination water, which is often sold at highly subsidized prices
despite recent attempts to decrease some of these market-distorting
and price subsidies (Al-Saidi, 2020b).
3.4 Safe desalination: desalination as critical infrastructure
Due to inance and cost consideration, desalination is often rendered
through large-scale plants, and, in the case of the Gulf, cogenerating
both power and water. Often one or a few desalination plants can provide
water supply for whole cities and towns. Al-Saidi and Saliba (2019) studied
246
the case of increased risks to coupled and large-scale systems in the Gulf.
A handful of desalination sites located on the Gulf coasts provide water
supply to major cities in the Gulf, such as Riyadh, Doha, Dubai or Abu Dhabi.
There are several risk scenarios threatening this mega-infrastructure, such
as major operational disruptions, sudden fluctuations of demands, price
instability of often-imported inputs, climate related events and attacks by
state or non-state actors (Al-Saidi and Saliba, 2019). Therefore, it is highly
relevant to conceive desalination infrastructure in water-scare countries
as critical infrastructure that should be safe and resilient.
In the Gulf, desalination plants are protected through special police units
(infrastructure security) and dierent layers of restricted access. Still, some
of the risks to desalination plants – particularly in semi-closed seas with
increased infrastructure development – are hard to protect against, e.g.,
those related to failures in other systems or external events. Heatwaves,
oil spills, industrial or human errors, and security incidents can disrupt
desalination operations with serious cascading eects. Resilience- and risk-
based strategies for desalination supply security through detailed plans
and anticipation of crises are needed (Al-Saidi and Saliba, 2019). In the Gulf,
GCC governments are increasingly aware of these aspects and are mainly
addressing them by ramping up their eorts to develop large reservoirs
for maintaining supply for days and weeks in the case of a disruption.
Besides, some desalinated water or treated wastewater is used to reinject
groundwater which serves as water storage (Darwish et al., 2015).
247
At the same time, regional cooperation can mitigate some of the
risks through supply diversiication, regional contingency plans,
integrated infrastructure and exchange of knowledge (Al-Saidi, 2021;
Al-Saidi and Saliba, 2019). In the Gulf, most desalination activities rely
on the Gulf waters, which are increasingly becoming vulnerable due
to rising salt levels, climate change, and the impacts arising from the
expansion of coastal development. Gulf countries can collaborate on
sharing knowledge and experiences related to the protection of coastal
infrastructure and ecosystems. There have been regional cooperation
initiatives such as the establishment of Marine Emergency and Mutual
Aid Center (MEMAC), which is a part of the Regional Organization for
the Protection of the Marine Environment (ROPME) established by the
Kuwait Convention of 1982 and adopted by all the Gulf littoral countries.
Current GCC-based plans include the establishment of a regional
climate research center, and increasing science-based collaboration.
Future regional cooperation eorts should explicitly address the cross-
boundary impacts of desalination, and develop knowledge and plans to
mitigate risks through contingency plans, including studying the option
of joint water storage and transfers.
4. Discussion: Collaboration towards a sustainable and circular
desalination
4.1 Desalination’s success as a broad management aim
For many decades, the ability of the desalination industry in the Gulf
to provide reliable water supplies for the domestic sector has been
248
dependent on professionalism and good management of the desalination
industry. Desalination has grown signiicantly since the 1950s in the Gulf,
and, despite existing environmental impacts, can serve as a reference
case for the wider Arab region, which can invest in low-energy and green
desalination technologies (Son et al., 2021). The success of desalination
in the Gulf in terms of a good coverage of water services at a reasonable
cost is also a function of strong public investments in both desalination
infrastructure and human capital (Saif, 2012). However, the desalination
industry in the Gulf results in important environment impacts and lacks
regulation, particularly in issues such as brine (Hosseini et al., 2021; Le
Quesne et al., 2021). Academic literature on the environmental impacts
of desalination often suggest that the desalination industry can solve
issues such as brine management through better technologies and
practices (Al-Absi et al., 2021; Jones et al., 2019). However, it is important to
understand that desalination plants operate within a narrow managerial
perspective of day-to-day operations. Moreover, desalination managers
(plant-level operators and decision-makers) are sometimes unwilling
or unable to tackle some of desalination’s environmental impacts.
This is due to costs associated with monitoring impacts of desalination
activities on the environment, mitigating these impacts (e.g., reducing
emissions or treating the brine) and reporting actions. If there is no clear
and enforceable legal frameworks mandating environmental protection
measures, desalination operators might not take action.
249
Figure 2 shows that for a sustainable desalination, it is important to
bridge the gap between the managerial perspective of the water supply
executives and the governance perspective of the water sector regulators
and policymakers. As mentioned earlier, sustainable desalination can
be guided by four broader sustainable development aims, namely
eficiency, environmental sustainability, equity, and security. However,
these aims have dierent interpretations from a managerial or a
governance perspective. For example, desalination managers are
more concerned with technical eficiency of desalination plants, and
associated distribution networks. In the Gulf, water supply managers are
investing in infrastructure to minimize water losses, revising building
codes to encourage water and energy eficiencies (e.g., through building
certiication), and encouraging behavioral change to reduce water
consumption (Saif, 2012). Gulf countries exhibit some of the world’s largest
ecological footprints (i.e., water, energy, food and carbon use per capita),
and environmental awareness is largely lacking. It is therefore highly
relevant to encourage responsible consumption through awareness
campaigns, role models, and environmental education. Pricing water
adequately can also play a role in making citizens appreciate its value.
Considering the current water price compared to household income in
the Gulf, aordability of water services – which should not exceed 5%
of monthly expenditure as an international standard – has not been an
issue.
250
At the level of desalination plants, improving performance through
managerial oversight, incentives, maintenance, and monitoring systems
are important eficiency considerations. Besides, desalination managers
understand environmental sustainability through interpreting existing
regulatory frameworks and seeking to comply with them – in case they
exist. In Saudi Arabia for example, the lack of speciic environmental
requirements and clear criteria (e.g., quality thresholds and clear
procedure for water intake and disposal) means that some desalination
plants might not have transparent data and monitoring systems (van
der Merwe et al., 2013).
Desalination costs are an important parameter for the desalination
industry to determine its ability to provide aordable supply or to invest
in technology with better environmental performance. Minimizing
desalination costs is at the heart of the social responsibility of the
desalination industry, although the ability of this industry to provide
aordable water and to minimize environmental impacts depends
on many external factors, including the availability of subsidies. The
economic feasibility of many of the environmental technologies,
including those towards materials’ recovery and brine minimization,
will depend on the level of the water taris (regulated by governments)
and the availability of some capital subsidies (for purchasing the rather
expensive technologies) or subsidies for the brine industry for the
development of more cost-eective technologies (Kumar et al., 2021).
While subsidization of the desalination industry might not be required
251
in the case of aordability (full price including environmental externalities
acceptable relative to households’ consumption and monthly income), it
is a common policy in the MENA region, and particularly advised for
countries with a large proportion of poor households.
Desalination operators and plant-level managers can work towards
more transparency using sustainability and/or inancial reports in order
to display responsibility and good performance. Instruments such as
benchmarking or environmental ranking of desalination plants have
been suggested as a way for the Gulf to improve its competition and
performance (Al-Sharrah et al., 2017). Besides, desalination plants are
less concerned with the diversiication of the dierent water supply
options and the resilience of the water supply to shocks. For them,
the key concerns are plant-based security, the avoidance of errors and
the availability of aordable production inputs as well as contingency
plans. For example, the desalination industry in the Gulf is increasingly
dependent on innovative technologies (e.g., membranes), which are so
far not produced locally (Al-Saidi and Saliba, 2019). On the other hand,
Gulf countries have accumulated a great deal of technical knowledge in
operating desalination plants. This knowledge can be shared with other
countries in the MENA region that desire to construct new plants to
compensate water scarcity.
252
Figure 2. Sustainable desalination from management and governance
perspectives (NOTE: igure to be redesigned professionally).
4.2 Desalination’s sustainability as a multi-level governance task
Desalination governance is a complex task embedded within legal
frameworks and policy choices regarding the sustainable development
of the whole water sector. Using the key success factors for desalination
governance depicted in Figure 2, one can highlight three overarching
253
recommendations. First, economic and environmental regulation of
desalination activities should be pursued at the same time. Economic
regulation is a comprehensive approach for closely monitoring and
improving the performance of the water sector (Hernández-Sancho,
2019). In the desalination case, it means working more closely with
desalination plants towards monitoring costs, improving competition
and the provision of incentives and instruments for performance
improvements. There are several soft and hard instruments for economic
regulations, ranging from benchmarking and “naming and shaming,”
yardstick measures for monitoring costs and providing incentives or
disincentives, to the installation of independent economic regulators.
Environmental regulation can be embedded within comprehensive
regulatory frameworks (e.g., independent regulators), but the goal of
economic regulation is basically to closely work with service providers
in order to improve their cost function and minimize environmental
impacts (Nour and Al-Saidi, 2018). Regardless of the shape of the regulatory
framework, environmental regulations for desalination activities
need to be revisited in the Gulf and the Arab region. Procedures and
quality thresholds for brine discharge are needed as a “lowest common
denominator” in regulation. Internationally, the quality of regulatory
frameworks in the MENA region seems lower than in other regions
such as Europe, the USA, or Australia (Sola et al., 2021).There are also
good practices from the region such as in Israel, where public support
enabled the desalination plants to invest in expensive brine transport
infrastructure, special monitoring systems and the rehabilitation of
coastal aquifers (Shulman et al. 2011).
254
Second, public leadership and industry-government-science
collaborations are essential for making sustainable desalination possible.
Public leadership is important for making desalination aordable
through subsidizing some capital costs (particularly for expensive
small-scale desalination), encouraging private sector participation
(e.g., through purchase agreements and cost sharing), and setting up
appropriate pricing policies. This does not mean providing unnecessary
subsidies or providing expensive (especially considering environmental
externalities) desalinated water for free or at a low-cost despite
aordability in terms of the household income. Some forms of “smart”
pricing policies with discounts and rebates for certain groups might
still be needed for guaranteeing equity in countries with large poor
populations (Al-Saidi, 2017b). Besides, many of the new environmental
technologies for lowering the impacts of desalination activities stem
from industry-science collaborations, which will still depend on public
Research & Development (R&D) funds prior to commercialization, e.g.,
the case of Zero-Liquid-Discharge techniques or emergent circular
desalination strategies (Bello et al., 2021; Le Quesne et al., 2021). Third
and inally, large-scale desalination as a sole or dominant supply
option needs to be scrutinized in the wake of rising risks and increasing
environmental damage. Alongside strategic storage, encouraging
conservation practices and cooperating with desalination plants on
emergency and resilience plans, policymakers should study options to
encourage supply diversiication and desalination at dierent scales. In
the near future, decentralized desalination can become more accessible
255
in terms of technologies and costs. The reliance on mega-desalination
projects can create path dependences and rigidities that are both risky
and irreversible.
5. Conclusion
The rise of desalination in the MENA region is expected to continue
due to its improving economic feasibility and rising water demands.
Desalination has become relatively aordable partly because
environmental externalities are not priced. While desalination is
necessary in many areas of the MENA region, it can produce serious
environmental damage in terms of pollution, emissions and the damage
of coastal ecosystems. Academic and policy debates often focus on
questions related technologies, which are perceived to “solve” some of
desalination’s negative impacts. The experience of the Arab Gulf countries
show that desalination can indeed provide a reliable and clean water
supply over the long-term, but it is not a technical panacea for water
scarcity since environmental impacts should be tackled. The desalination
discourse needs to include broader governance and regulatory issues,
alongside emergent topics related to the security and the diversiication
of water supply. In the following, some interrelated recommendations
are presented in order to advance sustainable desalination in the wider
MENA region using some lessons learned from the Arabian Peninsula.
1. Desalination as a broader good governance task (not only techno-
managerial issue): Good desalination governance is oriented towards
several normative principles grounded in a broader understanding of
256
sustainable development. There is a need to tackle desalination beyond
technical or managerial solutions and adopt several solutions to make
desalination low-impact, accessible and safe. As to be explained in
the next points, this also means incorporating softer issues related to
governance, regulatory policies, and inance and cooperation among
stakeholders (e.g. public planners and regulators, private investors,
managers of desalination plants, water distributors, users, and the civil
society).
2. Environmental regulation as a key gap: Low-impact desalination means
tackling environmental problems across the life cycle of desalination. At
the core of such an endeavor is a clear and enforceable environmental
regulation that includes standards for improving water quality, required
thresholds, speciic impact assessments and/or monitoring plans.
Environmental regulation is the missing link in the often technology-
driven debate on the management of the desalination brine, a highly
important topic for lowering desalination’s environmental footprint.
3. Public leadership for disseminating green desalination technologies:
Public leadership is important for lowering desalination costs, including
any necessary investments in R&D of green desalination technologies.
Alongside supporting environment-friendly desalination technologies
through public investments, public support to brine mitigation strategies
(e.g. infrastructure for brine transport) might be necessary. The private
sector needs also to be involved in co-developing and piloting these
technologies.
257
4. More participation for increased desalination’s access: Accessible
desalination often requires public investments, while new Public-Private
Partnerships can lead to a sharing of costs and risks. Private companies
are increasingly active in joint ventures with state companies through
long-term agreements to build and operate desalination plants. This
leads to increased investments in desalination activities, while the state
can retain control and ownership of most of the desalination assets
(e.g., as a majority asset owner in the desalination joint ventures).
5. Considering desalination at dierent scales: While large-scale desalination
remains a dominant option due to its cost eficiency over the long run, it
can enlarge desalination risks and should be accompanied by resilience-
based contingency planning. Although small-scale desalination remains
rather expensive, it is considered as an option for remote areas,
particularly using the nowadays-aordable renewable energies.
6. Broader engagement of developmental actors: The engagement of
development aid, civil society and local government can help deliver
desalination even for poorer communities with depleted water resources.
Local level actors from the civil society and development cooperation
can work together to provide inancing schemes and capacity building
programs for remote communities and/or small-scale farmers in order
to utilize desalination technologies to provide additional water supplies
for irrigation and domestic supply. Cost sharing through community-
based ownership or through special subsidy programs for purchasing
assets can help disseminate desalination. Such support programs exist
258
in other areas such as solar-based irrigation, and can provide important
lessons for promoting decentralized desalination.
7. Collaboration and co-development for more sustainability in the
desalination sector: From a macro-perspective, a sustainable and circular
desalination joins the two perspectives of desalination management
and water governance. Desalination managers have a more short-
term view that is focused on daily operations, compliance, costs per
unit and internal management. They should be encouraged to adopt
more sustainable practices with regard to their technical eficiency,
monitoring practices, transparency, reporting or contingency planning.
For this to happen, broader desalination governance should focus on
collaboration and co-development between dierent stakeholders
at dierent levels. Sector regulator, planner and policymakers should
encourage more instruments towards more integration among economic
and environmental regulation. Sustainable desalination will be an
outcome of collaborative eorts among desalination stakeholders, and
the increased attention to environmental and non-technical impacts of
desalination can encourage closer coordination and collaboration.
259
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Hussein A. Amery is a professor of water politics and policy at Colorado
School of Mines. He was the Chair of the Department of Humanities,
Arts and Social Sciences, and served as the Associate Provost and Dean
of Undergraduate Studies and Faculty. His academic expertise is in water
and food security in the Middle East, with a focus on the Arab Gulf states.
He also specializes in Islamic perspectives on water management, and in
trans-boundary water politics especially along the Litani, Jordan, Nile,
Tigris and Euphrates rivers. His books are Arab Water Security: Threats
and Opportunities in the Gulf States (Cambridge University Press),
and Water in the Middle East: A Geography of Peace (Texas University
Press; Co-edited). His academic contributions were recognized by his
selection as Fellow by the International Water Resources Association. Dr.
Amery had been a consultant to US government agencies, International
Development and Research Center (Canada), and to American water
engineering irms.
Marwa Daoudy is an Associate Professor of International Relations at
Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service (SFS) and the Seif
Ghobash Chair in Arab Studies at the Center for Contemporary Arab
Studies (CCAS). Prior to Georgetown University, Dr. Daoudy was a lecturer
at Oxford University (UK) in the department of Politics and International
Relations, a fellow ofOxford’sMiddle East Center at St Antony’s College
and a visiting scholar at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School
Contributors
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of Public and International Aairs. Dr. Daoudy’s research and teaching
focus on critical and human security studies, environmental politics,
climate security, water politics, negotiation theory, peace negotiations,
and Middle East politics.
Mohammed Mahmoud is the Director of the Climate and Water Program
and a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. His areas of expertise
include climate change adaptation, water policy analysis, and scenario
planning. He has held leadership positions in several organizations. Most
recently as Chair of the Water Utility Climate Alliance; a coalition of 12 of
the nation’s largest water utilities that collectively provide water to over
50 million people in the United States, with the purpose of providing
leadership and collaboration on climate change issues that aect water
agencies. Prior to that Mohammed was President of the North American
Weather Modiication Council; an organization dedicated to advancing
research and development activities that increase the scientiic knowledge
and proper use of weather modiication applications. Mohammed’s
educational background includes a B.S. and M.S. in Civil Engineering
from Michigan Technological University, and a PhD in Hydrology and
Water Resources from the University of Arizona. In addition, he is a
Faculty Associate with Arizona State University.
Hilmi S. Salem is a professor and holds three university degrees (PhD,
MSc, BSc) in the natural sciences and engineering disciplines. He is a
leader of teams, programmes, projects, and organizations in multi- and
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inter-disciplinary areas of expertise and interests. His work interests
focus on natural and human sciences, engineering, socioeconomics,
geopolitics, policy-, strategy- and decision-making in contribution
to sustainable development and the United Nations Sustainable
Development Goals (UN SDGs). This is with respect to areas related
to water resources management (conventional and non-conventional
resources), energy (fossil and renewable), the environment (pollution,
waste managements, etc.); public health, climate change impacts and
adaptation and mitigation measures, preservation and protection of
natural resources and the environment, and the water-energy-food
nexus, as well as seismology (earthquake science and engineering) and
disaster risk management. Currently, he is leading some projects on
sustainable development of plans and strategies of local and regional
municipalities. For potential joint works (research & development
programs, projects, consulting, authorship, editing, conferences, etc.) in
the above-mentioned areas.
Neda Zawahri is an associate professor of political science at Cleveland
State University. She works on environmental politics in the Middle
East and South Asia, where she has conducted extensive ield research in
India, Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Turkey. Professor Zawahri has
published over 20 journal articles and book chapters. Her articles are
published in International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Peace Research,
Global Environmental Politics, Development and Change,andInternational
Environmental Agreementsamong many other journals. She has also co-
267
edited special issues that appeared inInternational Studies Quarterly,
International Environmental Agreements, and International Negotiation.
Professor Zawahri has been co-principal investigator on grants from
the Social Science Research Council, U.S. Agency for International
Development, Eisenhower Foundation, and two Title VI grants from
the U.S. Department of Education. In the Middle East, she has advised
nongovernmental organizations, institutions, and states about issues
related to environmental politics.
Mohammad Al-Saidi is a research associate professor at the Center
for Sustainable Development at Qatar University. He holds a PhD in
economics from Heidelberg University. Previously, he worked as a senior
researcher with the Institute for Technology in the Tropics (ITT) of the
TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences in Germany. Dr. Al-Saidi has
worked on projects and published papers on Yemen, the Gulf, East Africa,
and Jordan on issues ranging from development and the environment
to water resources management and sustainable transitions.
Sinan Hatahet is currently a senior fellow at Omran Center for Strategic
Studies, and an associate researcher at the European University Institute.
He previously worked as a senior fellow at Al Sharq Strategic Research.
His research interests include the dynamics of Syria’s national and local
economies; non-state actors; the Kurdish political movement; and the
emerging regional order in the MENA region.
268
Rawan Hammoud previously worked as a fellow at Al Sharq Strategic
Research. She holds an MA from New York University and a BA from the
American University of Beirut.
Mehmet Emin Cengiz is a fellow at Al Sharq Strategic Research. He
received his B.A. in the Sociology Department from Ege University in
2016. During his B.A. he attended the Erasmus+ Program and studied
at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf as an international exchange
student in Germany. Cengiz received his master’s degree from the
Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the Middle East at
Marmara University in 2020. His pieces regarding the Syrian war and non-
state armed actors have appeared in national and international media
outlets and think tanks. His research interests are: Syrian Conflict, Non-
State Armed Actors, Turkish Foreign Policy, Volunteer Foreign Fighters,
Regional Kurdish Politics, and Political Islam.
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rigorous research to promote the ideals of
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