Avoiding downstream consequences: Australia’s role in promoting water security in the Middle East

Australia can partner with Middle Eastern countries on something we both really understand: how to manage scarce water.

Australia’s experience with water management can help to strengthen existing approaches in the Middle East and build capacity in an area that is of critical importance to the region. The government should facilitate two-way knowledge transfer between the Middle East and Australian agriculturalists to better engage the region and as an exercise in whole-of-nation foreign policy.

Highlighted in a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), water scarcity in the Middle East is increasingly perilous and may worsen instability in the region. Improved approaches to water use are a critical security need across the region.

Australia’s agricultural sector has water-saving solutions that can improve primary production in the Middle East and help protect against some of the worst outcomes of water insecurity. Lending Australian expertise would improve Australia’s diplomatic presence in the region through an uncontentious aid program while also creating new connections for Australian industry. And in working in the Middle East to share their knowhow, Australian experts may learn a thing or two about water management from people there.

According to the hydraulic theory of civilisation, when Mesopotamian farmers in modern-day Iraq became the first irrigators in around 6000BC, the need to ensure the just distribution of water from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers created perhaps the first organised form of government. Today, those same river systems in the fertile crescent of the Middle East are central to the region’s future stability. Water there is drawn not just from rivers, lakes and so on but from increasingly depleted underground sources. A warming climate is worsening scarcity by increasing surface evaporation and plant transpiration.

A lack of water precipitates social and economic challenges that can contribute to instability. Water scarcity in the Middle East has pushed people off rural land and caused environmental damage, social unrest and even international conflict.

Water scarcity and resulting threats to peace, prosperity and stability are not unique to the Middle East. Similar issues arise around the Nile, Mekong, Ural and Indus Rivers. Globally, disputed water rights present challenges to prosperity and security for individuals, communities and societies.

As the CSIS report outlines, technical, governance and social measures, if implemented in concert, can mitigate water scarcity and therefore the associated risks.

Biophysically, water is perhaps the ultimate growth limiting factor in plant production and, by extension, livestock farming. Other measures to promote crop and pasture yields, such as applying fertiliser, have little effect if there isn’t enough water.

The solution must be higher efficiency in managing and using water. And that comes down to integrating technical, economic and governance measures, areas in which Australian farmers, researchers and industry collaborators have made great advances.

The Middle East and Australia both have large swathes of arid, semi-arid and Mediterranean climate zones, and they are therefore suitable for similar agricultural products. Australian agriculturalists can produce profitably despite hydrological constraints.

For example, water use per kilogram of Australian cotton production has halved over the past 25 years thanks to improved irrigation infrastructure and management efficiencies.

Among approaches developed or used in Australia to mitigate the effects of water scarcity are use of drought resilient plant and livestock breeds, enforcement of water allocations, agricultural diversification, effective governance of water infrastructure, water pricing, applying machine learning to irrigation decisions, and, in places, economic diversification for a mix of agricultural and non-agricultural income streams.

In its Murray-Darling Basin Plan, for all of its shortcomings, Australia has learned internally how to build consensus in sharing water from rivers and lakes that cross political boundaries—in that case, state borders.

Nearly all these advances have been possible because of combined industry and government investment in research and development.

In Australia, water saving policy is routinely explained, discussed and therefore widely understood through conferences, academic journals and industry newsletters. Such communications would not be enough to strengthen water security in the Middle East, however. A hands-on approach would be needed.

The government should take action, including providing funding, to better enable Australian agriculturalists—from producers to researchers and government officials—to directly share their approaches in water management in the Middle East. Methods would have to adapt to the specific governance, economic and cultural contexts of partner nations.

In turn, existing water-smart innovations from the Middle East, many of them long-standing and with cultural value (such as drought-resilient livestock breeds, indigenous plant varieties and underground aqueducts or qanats) can be combined with approaches from Australia, allowing also for a two-way exchange of knowledge

Australian agriculture has thrived despite operating in some of the driest land on Earth. It has knowhow that it should share.