Planning and Piloting Watershed Rehabilitation for Improved Water Productivity with Water harvesting in Jordan

NENA’s water scarcity situation affects the region’s social and economic development and increases the vulnerability to land degradation and desertification – which in turn increases the competition and risk for conflicts around the shrinking natural resources, predominately water. Jordan is among the world’s most water scarce countries due to limited rainfall and water influxes, in combination with an increasing water demand from various sectors. Adding to that, climate change predictions point to increasing temperatures and an overall (locally varying) decline of seasonal rainfall. At the same time, the fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that extreme (rainfall) events will likely occur more frequently. The consequential occurrence of less frequent but heavier rainstorms may eventually lead to more frequent and severe floods, erosion, and droughts. Whilst the extreme events are largely threatening, agricultural adaptation technologies that can tackle those challenges and even benefit from the erratic (surface) water occurrence do exist – a prominent example is Water Harvesting (WH). The technology concentrates and stores excess rainwater in defined locations for targeted utilization over time. While WH retains only a (small) fraction of the available surface water - important for e.g. boosting the ecosystem’s recovery and/or local agriculture – it can also aim to decelerate runoff and control erosion. The project activities in Jordan focus on the interplay of the marginal dryland ecosystem (uplands) and the irrigated production system around the Jordan Valley (lowlands). The activity particularly tackles the ecohydrological rehabilitation of the largely degraded Jordan Valley’s side Wadis that are discharging towards the Jordan Valley. Mismanagement, deforestation and overgrazing have led to the degradation of the steep sloped side Wadis. Exploited vegetation and soils have limited retention functions and led to distinct surface runoff and generation of massive sediment fluxes, which negatively affects the downstream irrigated production system through e.g. siltation of reservoirs.

The service provider will contribute to the assessment of water productivity improvement at the watershed level; however, the primary focus be on ex-ante research on surface water (runoff) dynamics and the interrelated erosion/degradation processes and potential siltation of infrastructure. The interventions will focus on local community inclusive co-development of suitable agro-silvopastoral watershed rehabilitation and sustainable management scenarios – supported through small scale test-site establishment (implementation) and selected household and community level interventions to enhance livelihoods and resilience. An ex-ante assessment (ecohydrological simulation) will generate feedback on the potential effects of watershed rehabilitation on water, sediments, and various other ecosystem services (e.g. land cover, productivity, carbon), through investigating the upstream-downstream water and sediment relations between degraded Wadi zones and high-productive irrigated agriculture in the Jordan Valley.

The project will comprise community-inclusive design of rehabilitation and sustainable management options, small scale testing of rehabilitation implementation, and an ex-ante assessment of the potential for large scale impacts on the areas’ ecohydrology. In this way, the activities prepare the ground for sustainable agricultural management that can eventually benefit local communities through enhanced ecosystems that provide livestock feed and other viable services in Jordan’s rainfed and agro-pastoral Wadi environments.