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In Jordan’s cities, green tanker trucks supplying water are a common sight. The average Jordanian only receives one and a half days of access to piped water per week. When taps run dry, citizens and business owners pick up the phone to order a water delivery to fill their rooftop or basement storage tanks.
These trucks are usually not sent by the local water utility, however. Rather, they are operated by individual vendors who source their water from private wells with a license 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 leads to more intense and frequent droughts.
When the government struggles to supply enough water
Water delivery via road is increasingly relevant in major cities worldwide. In parts of the world, urban water networks have deteriorated to such a degree that 1 billion people already face frequent public water supply interruptions. This has led to a proliferation of informal water markets. In many water-scarce countries, truck drivers, well owners, or both operate without a license to evade charges and try to obscure their activities. Whether these markets alleviate or exacerbate water stress is a question research has yet to answer.
This is because the nature of illegal markets—they operate covertly—makes it tricky to analyze them. However, our team at the FUSE project has successfully connected models developed by economists and hydrologists to map out illegal water markets in Jordan, the world’s fifth most water-scarce country in the world. To ration its scarce water resources, Jordan introduced scheduled piped water supply interruptions in 1987. Since then, Jordanians have seen the average public water access duration fall from 7 to 1.5 days per week.
Trucked water up to 23 times more expensive
Our study shows tanker trucks play a much greater role in Jordan’s water supply than previously thought. One in every six to seven liters in the country is transported via road. This indicates that Jordan’s cities are already severely affected by extensive water shortages.
We found that more than half of the water that businesses use is currently supplied by tanker trucks, including the majority of the water used by hotels, stores and restaurants.
Tanker water also serves as a critical lifeline for households facing water shortages. Most Jordanians use rooftop storage tanks to bridge scheduled interruptions of tap water. Public water access, however, is unequally distributed. Some neighborhoods receive just six hours of piped water per week. When storage tanks are depleted or when tap water is interrupted, tanker deliveries are relied upon to fill the gap.
This lifeline is very costly: households pay up to 23 times as much for tanker water as for piped water, and the main reason is the cost of transportation. Tanker trucks drive 29 kilometers on average to buy water from rural wells and deliver it. This makes water delivery via road much more energy-intensive and expensive than piped water provision. We estimate that the transportation alone on average requires 18 kilowatt hours of energy per cubic meter of water sold, or 3 to 6 times as much energy as seawater desalination, itself an energy-intensive process, causing additional carbon emissions.
Most tanker water sold in Jordan is sourced illegally. The map below shows that the amount pumped from Jordan’s aquifers for tanker truck deliveries is 10 times greater than the quantity allowed by well licenses.
The illegal nature of these abstractions can hamper efforts to enforce groundwater conservation rules. Monitoring a large number of widely dispersed wells is difficult, and an interview study conducted in 2015 found evidence of numerous cases of land owners intimidating government employees. This is particularly problematic because Jordan’s groundwater levels are declining rapidly. The total amount of tanker water sold per year is equal to 34% of the groundwater abstracted beyond sustainable yields, exacerbating resource depletion.
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