Report: Water Scarcity in MENA
This report was authored by Phoebe Woodard, Pinsker Centre Policy Fellow 2025-26.
As tensions flare in the Middle East once again, much of the world’s attention has turned to oil. But a natural resource that will prove to be much more significant in decades to come is water. Already we are seeing it become weaponised - last month Iran targeted desalination plants in Kuwait, in retaliation to US strikes on its energy infrastructure. Water, and access to it, is fast becoming a monumental force shaping interstate relations in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
This report highlights cross border disputes, civil unrest, and access to desalination and technology as key areas where conflict could arise. The Middle East is facing a water crisis. Climate change undoubtedly plays a role in intensifying it, but many of the issues discussed are compounded by ineffective national practices, poor cooperation and a disparity in access to essential technologies.
The World Resources Institute predicts that by 2050, every single country in the Middle East and North Africa will live under extremely high water stress. Under these conditions, even a short-term drought could be devastating. Today in the Middle East, 83% of the population is exposed to water stress (a figure projected to rise to 100% by 2050) and if temperatures rise by 4°C, the region would experience a 75% drop in freshwater availability. Scientists predict a 5°C rise by the end of the century.
As is often the case, the countries most vulnerable to water insecurity are also the ones least able to adapt. Countries like Syria, Yemen, Lebanon or Iraq have been weakened by decades of conflict and insecurity, and now must deal disproportionately with the impacts of a warming climate. The links between water scarcity, climate change and conflict are complex, but what is clear is that overcoming water insecurity is a behemoth task that must involve national, regional and international cooperation, and a political will which currently is nowhere to be seen.
Cross-border water disputes
One of the main barriers to effective water management, and a potential flashpoint in the Middle East, are the many cross-border disputes over water sources. It has the highest dependency on international water bodies in the world, with two thirds of its annual renewable water coming from outside the region. All MENA states share at least one aquifer with a neighbour, however this interdependence is not matched by agreements to manage these precious resources.
No country is sovereign as far as its access to water is concerned. On Iran’s border with Afghanistan, there are sharp disputes over the Helman and Harirud rivers. Both originate in Afghanistan, but provide a lifeline to Iran’s rural populations. An uptick in dam construction in Afghanistan has dramatically reduced downstream flows, causing dust storms, food insecurity and outmigration in Iran’s rural provinces, as Iran accuses the Taliban of monopolising water resources.
In the Nile River basin, conflict has arisen between Egypt and Ethiopia over the latter country’s construction of the hydropower generating Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. While Ethiopia has succeeded in meeting its own energy security needs, Egypt’s reliance on the Nile’s water resources is under threat. A lack of transboundary agreements between these two countries - and Sudan, who also depends on water from the Nile - could result in further unilateral actions to monopolise the river’s shared resources.
Similarly in the Tigris-Euphrates river basin (covering areas of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan) prolonged drought has led to a “zero-sum game” of water extraction and competition. Turkey’s projects to stabilise its own water supply have had a devastating impact in Iraq where surface water has depleted by 80%. Saltwater intrusion due to a loss of groundwater - which in Iraq reaches 110km inland - makes agriculture impossible, impacting food security and encouraging mass migration into urban areas. The health impacts of depleting water sources are also extensive: waterborne illnesses like cholera or polio rise as freshwater mixes with pollution, dust storms harm respiratory health and spread disease across open areas.
There are no agreements to manage the Tigris-Euphrates riparians. Efforts to negotiate a water sharing agreement between Turkey, Syria and Iraq have been made since the 1920s, but open conflict and tensions have impeded their progress. The bilateral agreements which do exist are poorly enforced, and yield little tangible impact on downstream water levels. Realising that water management treaties are insubstantial, as climate change intensifies water scarcity, fears grow about cross-border conflicts provoked by the logic of self-help. To further illustrate, in Syria water levels in dams downstream of Turkey have almost reached ‘dead pool’ - where water levels have fallen so low they can no longer sustain flow through the dam. And as a result, Syria has repeatedly failed to deliver promised levels of water to Jordan’s Unity Dam. Water scarcity is perpetuating a cycle of hoarding and scarcity that ultimately erodes trust between nations and encourages resource-driven competition.
Civil unrest
The impacts of water stress on civil society also cannot be emphasised strongly enough. To illustrate, Iran is a country in its fifth year of drought; where reservoirs are operating at only 10% capacity, and levels of rainfall in 2025 were 92% lower than 2024. In late 2025 (before the US and Israel jointly launched Operation Epic Fury) Iran’s water shortage reached a near breaking point when its President warned that the capital Tehran faced evacuation, if rains didn’t return during the winter. Iran’s issues are driven by poor governance: informed by a revolutionary desire for self-sufficiency and a dogmatic rejection of outside technology, the Iranian regime constructed dams that could not be replenished, then were forced to draw immense amounts of nonrenewable groundwater to offset the resulting shortages. In rural areas trust in the regime to provide water and basic amenities has already deteriorated, as demonstrated by uprisings in Khuzestan, Hamadan and Sistan-Baluchistan.
Local resource conflicts have also been observed in Yemen in 2013, where it was reported that most rural unrest was water related. Furthermore, compounded by failing governance and the absence of regional cooperation between Iraq and Turkey, violent protests in southern Iraq followed a breakdown in water and energy services. The failure of central governments to prevent and respond to droughts has undermined livelihoods and caused significant anger and disenfranchisement. In some cases this has resulted in an uptick in Islamic State recruitment (a group that also uses control of water as a weapon to use against civilian populations).
Growing water scarcity threatens livelihoods, especially in rural areas where trust in governments is already faltering. The combination of existing tensions, authoritarian or failing leadership, cross boundary water hoarding and a worsening climate crisis could emerge into local conflicts, and possibly larger scale threats.
Desalination, technology, and cooperation
Desalination is often seen as a fix-all solution to water shortages across the region, especially in wealthy nations in the Gulf or in Israel. It has been a remarkable success for the aforementioned places: Israel and Gulf states undertake 45% of the world's freshwater desalination, easing the burden of water scarcity and supporting economic development. Israel’s desalination project has been so successful that it provides 80% of the country’s urban water, and authorities have begun using excess desalinated water to replenish the Sea of Galilee - thereby fortifying the country’s emergency water resources.
However, all good things come with a caveat and many countries in the Middle East and North Africa do not have the geography, financial capacity or the infrastructure to build effective desalination plants. The dominant approach to manage water crises has jumped to find ways to increase supply, rather than reform existing frameworks. Desalination is too expensive and too energy intensive to work on a region-wide scale, and its environmental consequences are too unsustainable to fulfil the entirety of a country’s water demand.
Ambitious technological solutions should not be treated as a panacea when there are obvious issues with water governance for Middle Eastern nations to address. For example, in Jordan about 50% of water is lost through leaks, theft, or inefficient usage. Introducing advanced technologies to create water supply will be useless if the infrastructure and management practices to distribute water remain ineffective. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies finds that even where countries have implemented systems that allow utility managers to detect leaks and view real-time information about water pressure and flow changes, a lack of political will to fix these problems renders any investment in technological solutions fruitless.
Recommendations:
In the Middle East and North Africa, good water management matters more than ever. Water (in)security has shaped the region for millennia, however as climate change intensifies and populations soar, the gap between water supply and demand is widening. As this report so far has touched upon, government policies have an important place in making these issues better or worse. This subsequent section focuses on several policy recommendations which will improve water management across the region.
Recognising the issue:
The first step towards improving water management is to recognise the issue, and unfortunately in many nations, disquiet over water scarcity and climate issues are being repressed. For example, in the UAE where twenty-one to thirty times more water is drawn from aquifers than is being replenished, any public discussion of the share of the sovereign wealth fund based on fossil fuel revenues is prohibited. In Iran large scale crackdowns on environmentalists and scientists, and violent repression of citizens who protest their government’s inability to safeguard water resources, are almost commonplace. The Egyptian government has similarly detained activists and filed lawsuits against high-profile environmental organisations.
Many regimes are stuck in a highly securitized mindset. Although this is understandable given the region’s seemingly intractable conflicts and instability, viewing civil unrest and anger over water insecurity as a risk to national security and territorial integrity is a mistake. With the right governance to safeguard water security, national security is also bolstered. In the Middle East and North Africa region where conflicts displace populations, destroy infrastructure, and where climate change and cross-border desserts disrupt water supply, having an informed engaged and prepared population, coupled with effective water management policies will enhance a country’s resilience and adaptive capacity.
Change water usage habits:
Per capita renewable water resources in the region are predicted to drop from 4000m3 per year in 1950, to 550m3 per year in 2050. Growing populations and intensifying droughts means that governments must look at how they use and conserve water resources. Depending on how you look at it, the good or bad news is that there is vast room for improvement across the region.
To address the pressing water security crisis coherence is needed across all government departments. The World Bank has identified that many factors driving poor water outcomes originate from outside the water sector. For example, even the perfect water management sector that has undergone important institutional and legal reforms could be uprooted by inconsistent macroeconomic policies that incentivise the ineffective use of water. To illustrate (although this is not to say that Iran has undertaken sweeping reforms to transform its water management practices) the Iranian regime hands out energy subsidies to poor rural farmers. Where fuel is cheap there is no need to develop energy efficient practices, so the overextraction of water from nonrenewable aquifers has become the norm. As a result, Iran has to contend with significant aquifer depletion, and thirty out of its thirty-one provinces are experiencing land subsidence.
In terms of water allocation, the bulk of a typical country’s water consumption goes towards agriculture. Domestic use accounts for only around 10% of water usage. However the farming sector still uses extremely inefficient irrigation systems - Saudi irrigation systems have overall efficiency rates of 45%, compared with the standard practice of 75%. Coupled with a national water strategy based on security supply rather than controlling demand, water shortages quickly become entrenched. The widespread construction of poor irrigation infrastructure creates an expectation and a demand that, due to the region’s climate, growing populations and other water security struggles, cannot always be met. More than 80% of the region’s wastewater, which could be used for irrigation, is lost. A resulting ‘tragedy of the commons’ can arise where those with access to groundwater have an incentive to use as much of it as possible before the water is exhausted. Fixing the issues of leakages, evaporation and theft that occur along existing irrigation systems, as well as imposing stricter controls on water demand can encourage the agricultural sector to grow more drought-resistant crops, and employ more water-efficient practices.
Finally, national policies cannot be optimised without accurate data on aquifers and groundwater extraction. Scientific monitoring networks in MENA are less extensive than in other regions of the world - likely due to the conflicts which plague the region - however accurate data is essential for groundwater extraction to be properly regulated.
Renegotiate river management treaties:
Durable international agreements on water allocation is crucial for downstream countries like Egypt, Iraq and Syria to thrive. These countries are dependent on their upstream neighbours for a steady flow of freshwater - however negotiating water management treaties is not just in the downstream riparians’ interests. The presence of such agreements can foster cooperation and trust between nations. While some treaties do exist, like the 1987 Protocol on Economic Cooperation between Türkiye and Syria, or the agreements between Lebanon and Syria or between Jordan and Syria, they are bilateral in nature and have achieved mixed success.
Although this is the most difficult solution to implement it is perhaps the most necessary. This report has highlighted the issues that arise due to the monopolisation of resources, mainly that the water supply of downstream nations can be restricted without warning. Other issues include saltwater instruction when rivers and aquifers are not replenished due to upstream water hoarding, and dust storms which travel across borders from areas with degraded grasslands.
A draft framework convention between members of the League of Arab States has existed for years, covering the management of shared water resources, however it has never been ratified or concluded. This stalemate will be impossible to overcome if efforts to reduce distrust do not accompany negotiations over access to shared water sources. A successful agreement should not be purely technocratic, it must first aim to dampen tensions by recognising the entrenched security concerns between Middle Eastern nations, where control of resources has serious strategic implications. In short, water management and political security-building objectives should go hand in hand.
Conclusion:
The truth is that water insecurity in the Middle East cannot be eliminated. But there are many steps that countries can take to mitigate it. This means carefully balancing interests and returning to bilateral and multilateral agreements to manage shared river basins. Local governments must prioritise water management as much as they focus on increasing water supply. The need for water will create new patterns of dependency between countries who hold the power to cripple downstream neighbours by restricting their water supply, and between those who can afford costly desalination technologies and those who can’t. However, the gravity of the situation also holds the opportunity for closer technological cooperation within the region. The growing shortage of water must force MENA nations to overcome narrow security interests, and turn to joint action to safeguard precious shared water resources.
As more and more countries head towards extreme water stress, we will see water become the primary force shaping Middle Eastern power relations, perhaps more so than any religious, ethnic, or historical divides.
