Let There Be Water: Israel's Solution for a Water-Starved World

by Seth M. Siegel

And politics and politicians are kept out of water governance, which is left to sophisticated technocrats to manage for the nation as a whole.

Although the water in the High Plains Aquifer is a renewable resource, it took thousands of years of rain and snow to fill a large part of what has been depleted just since the 1950s when the overpumping began.

Water problems are a proxy for bad governance, and there is a lot of bad governance.

Once the raindrop hits the ground, or the bucket, it is owned by the public.”30

“If you want to subsidize farmers or disabled people or give water to the country’s neighbors, no problem. Discount or give away all you’d like. But whatever you take or allocate, the government has to reimburse the water utility for the water used.”

In all, household water prices were increased forty percent.

At about the same time that the price hikes went into effect, the Water Authority took away management of all water and sewage from every municipality and created a new, apolitical system of municipal water utility corporations.

The Water Authority wanted the fifty-five new local water companies to be focused on fixing leaks, improving service, serving as incubators for new technologies, and thinking about how to save water or expenses. All of the water fees would now be spent on those goals, along with having adequate funding for building out the national water infrastructure.

If one of the new water corporations missed its goal in reducing leaks, it would be sanctioned by the Water Authority.

There would be no more “free” water for public parks.

a schedule was negotiated with the farmers to phase in the price increases for them. They, too, were unhappy, but were given comfort by a promise from the Water Authority that they would henceforth receive ample water once they started paying the real price. In past droughts, farmers would see their water allocations cut, and they were assured that going forward they could get all of the water they wanted to buy.14

The effect of introducing real pricing for farms and homes almost immediately changed usage levels. With no rationing or limit on supply, real pricing induced consumers to cut their use of household water by sixteen percent.

Farmers didn’t need a phased-in, multiyear step-up pricing schedule to give them time to transition to new crops. They began changing their water-use patterns in the first ...

The Water Commission had an ongoing and aggressive consumer education campaign on why everyone had to save water. It was a real success. Consumer usage dropped eight percent. Then we used price as an incentive. Almost overnight, consumers found ways to save nearly double the amount of water they had saved because of our years-long education campaign. It turned out that price was the most effective incentive of all.”

If some world-renowned cities were losing forty percent or more of their water to leaks,17 it didn’t matter to the Water Authority that Israel, in 2006, was losing about sixteen percent.18 From the Authority’s perspective, it was still unacceptably high.

“We are spending more than four hundred million dollars on one new desalination plant. If we can cut our national water losses by a few percentage points, the amount of water we add is equal to what a new desalination plant will produce.”

The Water Authority wanted to change that culture and to use Israel’s cities as laboratories for new ideas in water. Inventors were invited to pitch concepts to the utilities as if the utilities were high-tech companies.

“The world’s water crisis can only be solved with smarter use of the water we have,”

DMR utilizes a “consumption fingerprint” for each of the twenty-seven thousand water meters in the Ra’anana area. The system uses the same analytics that credit card companies use in trying to detect credit card fraud. If a home, business, government office, or farm is suddenly outside of its profile, the municipal utility assumes it could be because of a leak.

Despite the many parts of the Jerusalem water system that go back to the pre-State era—and a few even to the Ottoman period—water leaks are only thirteen percent in Israel’s capital with many of the city’s modern sectors being at six percent.

In general, more than fifty percent of flood-irrigation water is wasted.4

If, he imagined, agricultural water could be reduced by even a few percentage points through smarter irrigation, more food could be grown or the extra water could be available for household use for the country’s fast-growing population.

In all, experts estimate that about one-third of the water is lost with sprinkler irrigation.8

Irrigating a plant drop by drop limits evaporation and delivers the water that the plant needs directly at its roots. The water savings are significant—only four percent of the water is lost to evaporation or unnecessary absorption into the soil.

In every experiment Blass conducted, the yield from crops watered with drip irrigation was higher than with other known irrigation techniques.

First, use of drip irrigation can save as much as seventy percent of the water that would otherwise be used for irrigating the crop. That number isn’t always so high, but forty percent water savings are now routine.27

Second, drip irrigation will produce a larger harvest and usually a higher-quality one, as well.

In some recent controlled-environment studies in the Netherlands, state-of-the-art drip-irrigation equipment caused increases of up to 550 percent over open-field irrigation—while saving forty percent of the water.28

a new word coined by combining fertilizer and irrigation. Just as a lot less water is used with drip-irrigated plants, much less fertilizer is also used. This saves the farmer the expense of all of that extra fertilizer and spares society from its deleterious effects, including environmental disasters to clean up later.

“The stalk adds nothing to the wheat, so why waste water growing it?”

Now, researchers at Ben-Gurion University and Hazera are developing melons that can grow with even saltier water that would further reduce the amount of freshwater needed to dilute the brackish water used for irrigation. If successful, this is likely to set off development of other salt-absorbing fruits and vegetables.

Around the world today, only about five percent of the irrigated agricultural fields utilize drip irrigation or other micro-irrigation techniques.

Once there is a cost to farmers for the water they use—as is the case in Israel—farmers will have an incentive to modernize their farms and to use all kinds of technology to preserve water and to purify marginal water.

While government subsidies generally distort the marketplace, the introduction of technology for poor farmers may be a wiser use of government resources than subsidized water.

Different drippers have been developed for different levels of water purity; no water source is incompatible with drip irrigation.

If a country can reduce its agriculture water use by just fifteen percent—an easy goal with drip irrigation—that extra water would more than double what people have available to them.

“The world should think of Israel as a laboratory, but also as an inspiration,” Barak says. “If we can do it out here, in the middle of a desert, anyone can do it.”

Right after World War II, mostly in the US and Great Britain, the idea of treating sewage before dumping it took hold. The motivation wasn’t a concern about pollution or a case of incipient environmentalism. Rather, it was in response to the erroneous belief that untreated sewage was causing polio just as sewage-tainted river water had once caused cholera.

The decision to attempt to use sand, a process that came to be called Sand Aquifer Treatment, or SAT, to obtain tertiary-quality reclaimed water challenged conventional scientific and engineering wisdom.

To everyone’s great relief, SAT proved to be a perfect tertiary treatment. The six-month to one-year descent through the sand into the aquifer stripped away all impurities, and the water was of superb quality.

Today, water from Shafdan can be used for anything except drinking.

SAT water

A portion of Israel’s reclaimed wastewater is also used to increase the water volume of its rivers, enhancing their well-being.

There has also been some planning done to begin using tertiary-treated wastewater for fighting forest fires.

treated sewage now makes up about a third of the national water used in agriculture, or about twenty percent of ...

Spain is second in the world in reuse of reclaimed water with around twenty-five percent, even if most affluent countries like the US reuse less than ten percent.

the comprehensively treated sewage water changed the agricultural landscape, permitting Israel to feed itself and to be an agricultural exporter of significance—whether in years of abundant rain or scarcity.26

Reclaimed sewage is more reliable because it isn’t dependent on the vagaries of climate and rainfall, and even with all of the infrastructure required to develop it, reclaimed sewage is ultimately cheaper.27

Em comparacao com a agua da chuva

when farmers were told that they would get a twenty percent extra allocation of treated water for every unit of their freshwater allocation they did not use, the perpetually water-craving growers began to sign up. The treated water was also offered to them at a sharply reduced price, giving them even more incentive to switch.

And, due to the source of much of the treated water, the water they were getting was rich in nitrogen, saving the farmers on their fertilizer costs.

When farmers were promised that—unlike the fluctuating annual freshwater allocation they each had to endure—their annual treated-water allotment would be locked in, farmers’ commitment to reclaimed water was assured.