The once mighty Jordan River, where Christians believe Jesus was baptized, is now little more than a polluted stream that could die next year unless the decay is halted, environmentalists said yesterday.
The famed river “has been reduced to a trickle south of the Sea of Galilee, devastated by over exploitation, pollution and lack of regional management,” Friends of the Earth, Middle East (FoEME) said in a report.
More than 98 percent of the river’s flow has been diverted by Israel, Syria and Jordan over the years.
“The remaining flow consists primarily of sewage, fish pond water, agricultural run-off and saline water,” the environmentalists from Israel, Jordan and the West Bank said in the report to be presented in Amman yesterday. “Without concrete action, the LJR [lower Jordan River] is expected to run dry at the end of 2011.”
The river — which runs 217km from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea — and its tributaries are shared by Israel, Jordan, Syria and the West Bank.
In 1847, a US naval officer who led an expedition along the river described navigating down cascading rapids and waterfalls. Today the Jordan is a brackish stream barely a few meters wide.
Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian communities along the lower Jordan river — about 340,000 people in all — dump raw sewage into the river.
Ironically, if the sewage stops flowing into the river — which Israel plans to do on its stretch — the damage could be even greater unless additional measures are taken to reduce the salinity of the water.
FoEME believes the solution lies in releasing huge amounts of fresh water into the river.
The Jordan once had a flow of 1.3 billion cubic meters a year, but now discharges only an estimated 20 million to 30 million cubic meters into the Dead Sea.
“A new study we commissioned reveals that we have lost at least 50 percent of biodiversity in and around the river due to the near total diversion of fresh water, and that some 400 million cubic meters of water annually are urgently needed to be returned to the river to bring it back to life,” said Munqeth Mehyar, FoEME’s Jordanian director.
Israel, Syria, Jordan must all return water to the ailing river, the report says.
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