Shared Water Resources in Western Asia: an Inventory Approach
-- a _kt75 | reprint NEW: explore all _kt75 | publications via the news db... and leave your comments here The sharing of water resources has been an influential feature affecting life, society and development in the Arabian Peninsula , the Mashrek and Mesopotamia for millennia. Historically, communities living in these arid and semi-arid regions always shared the water of rivers, springs and wadis, although this was more out of necessity than idealism. Water resources were traditionally managed at the local level, with tensions emerging between Bedouins, shepherds, pastoralists and growing urban centres. Water management and irrigation schemes – such as the underground aqueducts or falaj networks found in Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Yemen – sustained different communal needs for dozens of centuries, while the marshes of Mesopotamia, the Tigris floodplain and the Jordan River Valley were cultivated and sustained successive civilizations since earliest of times. Hills...