Global Rundown
- On the heels of record-setting drought, heavy rains and dam failures have inundated farmland and homes in northern Syria.
- Water reserves in Athens’ largest reservoir tripled from October to April, bringing a temporary reprieve to the water-strapped capital.
- Residents in Utah continue to oppose a 40,000-acre data center development proposing to divert water from near the Great Salt Lake for use on-site.
- Southern Iraq’s historic wetlands have returned after a five-year absence, with winter rains flooding roughly one-third of the habitat’s former domain.
HotSpots H2O: Aleppo, Syria
Between 2006 and 2021, three major droughts in Syria depleted an estimated 60 percent of the country’s groundwater reserves, according to a new report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Desertification has meanwhile expanded, touching nearly three-fourths of the country and raising concerns over the long-term health of food and water systems. These issues came to a head last year, when the worst drought to hit Syria in decades dropped annual rainfall totals to 60 percent of their historic average. The country’s wheat harvest was slashed by three-fourths of its expected output as a result.
This spring, precipitation extremes are once again wreaking havoc. In the northern Aleppo region, recently parched farmland and homes are now inundated with two square miles of floodwaters, two months after heavy rains first fell in the area, Al Jazeera reports. In the immediate aftermath of the March storms, more than 6,000 people were displaced from their homes, according to the UN’s humanitarian agency. Four children, crushed under a collapsed mudbrick home, were killed.
“Rainfall is no longer distributed within a stable and predictable seasonal cycle,” writes Milia Esper, the author of the Carnegie report. “Rather, it has become increasingly irregular and intermittent, thereby reshaping the very concept of a ‘rainy season’ in Syria.”
Weeks later, the impacts of these storms are still being felt. A series of dam failures — attributed to years of civil conflict and governmental neglect for the country’s water infrastructure — continues to upend downstream life in the Al-Khabur river basin. In a last-ditch effort to protect their land and irrigation systems, farmers have built makeshift embankments and are pumping floodwater away from their crops. This puts the country’s entire distribution system in flux: the agricultural sector accounts for 88 percent of the country’s total water use, compared to just 9 percent used for public drinking water, and 3 percent for industry.
“Rapid expansion of water-intensive agriculture, dependence on subsidies, and weak water governance created deep structural fragilities which were often worsened by short-term fixes, such as large-scale irrigation,” wrote the authors of a UN report published in December on the “drought-migration-conflict nexus” in Syria. “True resilience requires avoiding maladaptation, integrating traditional water-harvesting and land-management practices with modern technologies, diversifying crops and farming systems, and ensuring that adaptation strategies consider long-term impacts on people and ecosystems.”
Recent WaterNews from Circle of Blue
- As a Colorado Aquifer Runs Low, Dangerous Heavy Metals Threaten Rural Communities’ Drinking Water — Inside Climate News
- Supreme Court Rules For Public Interest in Line 5 Case — Decision seen as step forward in state effort to shut down old oil pipeline.
The Big Picture
During last year’s drought in Greece, the Mornos Reservoir — Athens’ largest water reserve — shrank to half of its historic size, and reservoir storage fell beneath the city’s average annual demand.
In response, the Greek government declared a water emergency and issued plans to divert two mountain rivers toward the capital, Deutsche Welle reports. Rural residents and farmers protested the idea, raising concerns that their own livelihoods and needs would be placed at risk, with preferential treatment seemingly given to the country’s largest city.
Roughly half of Greece’s available drinking water is lost to leaky pipes and theft, according to government figures. “Hope is not a strategy,” Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greece’s prime minister, said during an address last year.
This spring has brought temporary reprieve. New satellite images (above) published last week by the European Space Agency indicate that water levels in the Mornos reservoir have tripled from last October (left) to April (right).
This Week’s Top Water Stories, Told In Numbers
619 million gallons
The volume of water annually a massive new data center project in Utah is seeking to transfer from a spring near the Great Salt Lake to its proposed 40,000-acre campus, which will include a newly constructed natural gas-fired power plant, reports the Salt Lake Tribune.
This water has historically been used to irrigate a nearby ranch, a deal that was first agreed-upon in 1904. In response to large local protests, the developer — led by Kevin O’Leary, of Shark Tank and Marty Supreme fame — withdrew the water transfer application, but nonetheless intends to move forward with the project.
On the Radar
Between 2021 and 2025, the Ishan Hallab area of southern Iraq — a historic stretch of wetlands and marshes located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers — dried up completely amid longstanding drought.
This dry spell was marked by mass fish die-offs and the drilling of deep wells to access groundwater reserves, a desperate effort that even farmers acknowledged was unsustainable in the long run. The continued expansion of nearby oilfields, meanwhile, required the daily extraction of 60,000 cubic meters of water from the Tigris, further straining supplies.
Pastoralists and farmers were forced to abandon these lands, which some believe are the vestige of the biblical Garden of Eden. Certainly, the rains that fell consistently this winter have been viewed by some as divine intervention.
The water levels at reservoirs along the Tigris have replenished, and the marshes are experiencing a “relative revival,” Al Jazeera reports. According to Reuters, the percentage of submerged marshland has risen to between 32 percent and 38 percent — a substantial increase from the high of 8 percent measured over the last half-decade.
