How Israel survived worst drought in 900 years

Israeli water experts say that a combination of water from rainfall, recycling of wastewater, desalination of seawater, and a large-scale water conservation campaign has made Israel nearly drought-proof. That assessment might be more regionally relevant than ever amid a new National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) study, released in March, showing that a drought from 1998 to 2012 in the eastern Mediterranean was the area’s worst drought in 900 years.

Today, more than half of the water supplied in Israel for all uses is self-generated, said Uri Schor, a spokesperson for the Israeli government’s Water Authority.

“That makes us a country that can pass a [severely dry] year and even a series of drought years without worrying too much,” Schor said.

The Jewish state’s ability to create a sufficient water supply is particularly noteworthy in light of an assessment by Dr. Ben Cook, lead author and climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at New York’s Columbia University, that “climate change on average will be making this particular region in the world dryer in the coming decades and over the next century.”

“That means we need to be much more careful with how we use and conserve water,” Cook said, citing his familiarity with Israeli water conservation methods such as desalination.

NASA’s latest research reconstructed drought history in the Levant region—Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories—by studying tree rings. Dry years are indicated thin tree rings, while relatively wet years are indicated by thick rings.

Trees, Cook said, tend to “put on one ring of growth every year. We can look at the alternating patterns of wide and narrow rings and reconstruct drought variability and wetness for these previous centuries. And then we can look at the magnitude of those growths to tell us the magnitude of the drought or the magnitude of the wetness that would have occurred.”