Can the Environment be a Peacemaking and State-building Tool?

Avner Vengosh and Erika Weinthal View Solving the Water Crisis in Gaza as a Potential Step Toward Collaboration p.2

Half a world away, Erika Weinthal was keeping a watchful eye on the Palestinian election returns from her home and book-strewn office in Durham, N.C.

An associate professor of environmental sciences and policy at the Nicholas School, Weinthal is a political scientist who specializes in the role environmental issues play in peacemaking and state building, especially in new and emerging governments in Central Asia.

Much of Weinthal’s research has focused on conflict and cooperation over transboundary water issues in the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. But working with Vengosh, her husband since 2000, she has co-authored numerous papers on water issues and their policy implications across the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean, including in Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Vengosh handles the science; Weinthal parses the policy.

Both share a conviction that the environment can play a crucial role in peacemaking and state building in the contentious region—if given the chance.

“People who are involved in peacemaking tend to focus on humanitarian efforts, political efforts and military solutions, but they leave environmental initiatives out of their toolbox,” Weinthal says. “That’s unfortunate, because the environment is another tool that could be used to build trust between governments, enhance public welfare and health, link societies and establish longterm communication and collaboration.”

Water issues in the Palestinian-controlled Gaza Strip are a textbook example of this, she says.

“The rapid population growth in Gaza and the sole dependence on ground water for both domestic and agricultural consumption there presents a serious state-building challenge for Hamas if it hopes to foster political stability and economic development,” Weinthal says.

A narrow swath of low-lying land about twice the size of Washington, D.C., the Gaza Strip is wedged between the modern borders of Israel and Egypt on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, near the northern edge of the Negev Desert. Covering only about 360 square kilometers, it has a population of about 1.4 million, making it one of the most densely populated spots in the world. The population is expected to double within the next decade.

The rapid growth has led to a severe overexploitation of the strip’s limited natural water resources and a sharp decrease in its ground water table in recent years, Vengosh has found. This has allowed seawater and saline groundwater from adjacent and underlying water basins to the east to seep into the aquifer from which Gaza and parts of southern Israel draw their water.

“High levels of salinity and boron in the intruding waters, coupled with nitrate pollution from sewage and farm runoff, have rendered most of Gaza’s ground water unsuitable for either human or agricultural consumption,” he says. “Nonetheless, this remains the sole source of water for the people of Gaza.”

Using isotopic and chemical tracers to identify the sources of the salinity, nitrates, boron and other harmful contaminants in water is a key focus of Vengosh’s research—one that makes it particularly useful for policymakers, international aid agencies and environmental managers looking to devise ways to remove or reduce pollutants from drinking water, not only in Gaza but throughout much of the Middle East.

“Because different sources of water pollution have unique isotopic fingerprints, we’re able to identify clearly the source of the contamination and delineate between natural and man-made sources,” he explains.

The results of his meticulously executed studies have, at times, confounded widely held but scientifically shaky assumptions about the causes of the region’s water woes.

“For instance, we have shown that Gaza’s boron pollution is associated primarily with the natural migration of saline groundwater from Israel into the Gaza Strip—not, as has long been presumed, from sewage contamination where boron is used as a bleaching agent,” Vengosh says.

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