Water in Jordan

One of the most water-scarce countries on earth, Jordan supplies its people with only about 60 cubic metres per person per year, a fraction of the absolute-scarcity threshold. Its supply leans on transboundary rivers and deep fossil aquifers, and the national answer is now desalination at Aqaba.

Water has always decided where and how people live in Jordan. The Nabataeans engineered Petra around that problem, cutting channels and cisterns into rock to hold a year of rain. The conveyors that keep Amman supplied today do the same job at a modern scale. The pressure has never been greater than it is now.

Hydrologists define absolute water scarcity as 500 cubic metres per person per year. Jordan lives on roughly an eighth of that, and the number has been falling for decades. The population keeps growing, accelerated by successive waves of refugees, while living standards rise and farms expand.

The result is a series of hard trade-offs. Water allocated to agriculture does not reach Amman, and every cubic metre pumped this year leaves the aquifer holding less the next. Jordan cannot resolve any of this alone: most of its supply crosses a border before it arrives.

A quick-reference dashboard of Jordan's water market: the headline economy and water indicators⁴³⁴⁴, water stress against the scarcity thresholds, non-conventional supply, and the institutions that govern the sector.

One interactive map of Jordan's water, with four switchable views built from real geodata and ordered from the natural setting to the engineered response. Climate & drought maps the aridity gradient against the published warming and drought projections. Water stress grades the twelve governorates by supply pressure. Demand shows where municipal demand is concentrated and growing. Infrastructure brings the physical system together: rivers, major dams, treatment plants, desalination, and the canals and conveyors that move water to the cities. Sources are cited under each view, and the tracked project pipeline is listed in the table below. Groundwater abstraction by basin is charted under Water resources.

Jordan covers about 88,780 km², east of the Jordan River.¹ The Jordan Rift Valley, about 5,000 km², runs from Lake Tiberias, 212 m below sea level, through the Jordan Valley to the Dead Sea, 417 m below.¹ It is the lowest valley in the world.² East of it rise highlands of 600–1,600 m, cut by side wadis that drain to the valley.¹ Beyond lies the Badia, a desert of about 69,000 km² that extends the Arabian Desert.¹ The main surface basins are the Yarmouk and the Zarqa, together with the Mujib, Dead Sea, Hasa and Wadi Araba basins.¹

Rainfall

Rain is scarce and falls in a short season. Over 91% of the country receives less than 200 mm a year.¹ Station records range from 28 mm in the southern Badia to 570 mm at Ras Muneef in the northern highlands.² In the Jordan Valley, rainfall drops from about 280 mm at Deir Alla to 71 mm at Ghor Safi.² Rain-fed farming needs more than about 250 mm, which confines it to the northern and western highlands.² The season runs from October to May. About 80% of the rain falls from December to March, peaking in January.² The national average was 94 mm over 1937/38–2004/05, but only 80 mm in the last ten years of that period.¹

Temperature and trends

Mean annual temperature ranges from 13 °C in the southern Badia to 28 °C at Aqaba, with a national mean of 18.6 °C.² The climate is semitropical in the Rift Valley, Mediterranean in the highlands and continental in the eastern desert.¹ Station records show rainfall falling significantly, by 1.2 mm a year, in every month of the rainy season except January.² Since the 1960s, maximum temperatures have risen by 0.3–1.8 °C and minimum temperatures by 0.4–2.8 °C, depending on the region.³ Annual rainfall has declined by 5–20%. The World Bank warns that multi-year droughts will become the new normal.³

Projections

The third national communication projects warming by 2085 of about 2.1 °C under a moderate scenario and 4 °C under high emissions.² Rainfall in 2070–2100 could fall by about 15% or 21% respectively, with larger declines in the west.² The national average of summer maximum temperatures could exceed 42–44 °C, and droughts would become more frequent.² The World Bank projects warming of up to 2.9 °C by 2050, and 30% less water per person by 2040.³

Rainfall and temperature in numbers

Averaged over the whole of Jordan, ERA5 reanalysis gives about 82 mm of rain a year and a mean temperature of 19.4 °C for 1991–2020. About 57% of that rain falls in January, February and March, and 6 months average less than 5 mm. Since 1971 the country has warmed by about 0.43 °C a decade. Average rainfall in 1993–2022 was within 3% of the 1951–1980 level, though single years swing widely.

Projected change

Source: World Bank Climate Change Knowledge Portal, retrieved September 2026. ERA5 0.25° reanalysis for the annual series (1950–2022) and the monthly climatology (1991–2020); CMIP6 0.25° multi-model ensemble median for the projections, as change against 1995–2014. These are national averages, which hide the gap between wet highlands and dry interiors, and reanalysis rainfall over deserts carries wide uncertainty.

A budget of about 1.1 billion cubic metres

In 2022 the Ministry of Water and Irrigation put total water use at 1,127 million cubic metres.⁴ The sector abbreviates the unit to MCM, and one MCM is a billion litres. Groundwater supplied about 58% of it (651 MCM), surface water about 26% (292 MCM) and treated wastewater the remaining 16% (180 MCM).

Most of the large sources are shared with a neighbour, which makes water management partly a matter of diplomacy. It also means some of these numbers depend on decisions taken in Damascus or Jerusalem rather than in Amman.

Surface water: three stressed rivers

Surface water supplies about a quarter of the total, and the three principal rivers, the Jordan, the Yarmouk and the Zarqa, have all become unreliable. Upstream diversion and over-pumping in Syria and Israel reduce what arrives. The Lower Jordan once carried some 1.3 billion m³ a year; it now runs at roughly 2% of its historic flow, badly degraded. The Yarmouk matters most for supply, at around 40% of Jordanian surface water. A 1987 treaty with Syria governs it, but that treaty covers surface flows only: Syrian groundwater pumping in the catchment lowers the river before it ever reaches the Wahda Dam.⁹

The main rivers

The table ranks the rivers of Jordan by the largest natural flow they reach inside the country. Natural flow is the modelled long-term average before any withdrawals. For a heavily used river it measures what the river could carry, not what arrives today.

Sources: Grill, Lehner, Thieme et al. (2019), Mapping the world’s free-flowing rivers, Nature 569, dataset under CC BY 4.0, for length, natural flow (WaterGAP, 1971–2000) and free-flowing status, meaning the share of the river’s length inside Jordan still classed as free-flowing. No flow figure is given below 20 m³/s, where a global model is too coarse to rank small rivers. Dams from the FAO AQUASTAT regional inventories, matched to the nearest river reach, so a dam on a tributary close to a main stem can be counted against the main stem. The same rivers are drawn on the water map above under Rivers & lakes.

Groundwater: the mainstay, over-drawn

With surface water unreliable, most of Jordan's supply comes from underground. That is around 58% of the budget, roughly 651 MCM a year, drawn from twelve mapped basins.

Each basin has a safe yield: the amount that can be drawn each year and replaced by rain. For Jordan as a whole that is estimated at only 275–290 MCM/yr, so abstraction runs at more than twice the sustainable rate. The chart breaks the imbalance down basin by basin, and in the worst cases pumping is several times what recharge can replace. Disi is a separate case. Its water is fossil water, rain that fell tens of thousands of years ago with nothing refilling it. Pumping there is mining rather than harvesting.

Water tables are measurably falling where over-abstraction is worst: about 1 m per year in the Azraq basin, 1–3 m per year in Amman–Zarqa well fields, with declining levels and rising salinity in Jafr. Abstraction after MWI groundwater monitoring; safe-yield midpoints after Altz-Stamm (2012), Figure 6.

Non-conventional resources

Treated wastewater is the fastest-growing resource, now around 16% of the budget. Almost all of it is reused in agriculture, which frees fresh water for drinking. The National Water Strategy expects treated volumes to reach about 240 MCM by 2040 as population and treatment capacity grow. The schedule for building the plants is the less certain half of that forecast.

Water in Jordan is contested between sectors. On the ministry's 2022 figures agriculture used about 51% of supply, the municipal sector about 46% and industry around 3%.⁴

The balance has shifted over two decades. In 2005 total withdrawal was 941 MCM, of which agriculture took 65%, households 31% and industry 4%.¹⁰ By 2023 total demand had reached about 1.2 billion m³ on the ministry's figures, with agriculture at 623 MCM and household and tourism use at 527 MCM.¹¹ Refugees added pressure. Household demand in the northern governorates rose by about 40% during the years of hosting Syrian refugees.¹¹

The valley that irrigation built

Intensive irrigation began in 1958, when Jordan started diverting the Yarmouk into the East Ghor Canal, later renamed the King Abdullah Canal. The canal was 70 km long in 1961 and reached 110.5 km after three extensions between 1969 and 1987.¹⁰ Irrigated farming covered about a third of the cultivated area in 2004. Drip irrigation served about 85% of equipped land in the Jordan Valley and 90% in the highlands.¹⁰ Agriculture's share of GDP fell from 6% in 1992 to 3% in 2007.¹⁰

Groundwater beyond its limits

Groundwater carries most of the load, and more than it can bear. The ministry puts the safe annual limit at about 419 MCM, of which 275.5 MCM is renewable. Withdrawals in 2023 reached about 699 MCM, some 281 MCM over the limit.¹¹ FAO counted six of the country's 12 groundwater basins as overexploited.¹⁰ Treated wastewater has become the fastest-growing supply, with about 195 MCM reused in 2023.¹¹

Dry years bite hard. In 2021 six of Jordan's 14 dam reservoirs dried up as rainfall fell to 60% of the annual average.¹² The wet winter of 2025–26 reversed that, and King Talal Dam reached its full 75 MCM in March 2026.¹³

Withdrawals over time

FAO’s AQUASTAT estimates put Jordan’s freshwater withdrawals at 451 million m³ in 1975 and 950 million m³ in 2022. Agriculture’s share of the total moved from 70% in 1979 to 52% in 2022.

Source: FAO AQUASTAT via the World Bank World Development Indicators, retrieved September 2026. AQUASTAT revises national figures irregularly and fills the years between surveys, so a jump between two adjacent years usually marks a new national estimate rather than a change on the ground.

Jordan's modern water system is dams, pumps and pipes, most of it built to move water uphill to the high-demand area around Amman. A substantial share is lost en route: estimates of network losses run as high as 50%, roughly 260 MCM in 2022 alone.⁴ The sector calls this non-revenue water, meaning water produced and paid for but never billed, whether it leaks away or is taken without a meter. Reducing it costs less than developing new supply, which makes it one of the highest-value interventions available, and Amman's utility is already metering at scale to attack it.⁷ The National Water Strategy targets losses below 25% by 2040; getting there is mostly a question of capital and metering rather than of technique.⁵

The National Water Carrier, finally moving

The answer on the supply side is the Aqaba–Amman Water Desalination & Conveyance project, usually shortened to AAWDC. It pairs a 300 million m³/year desalination plant on the Red Sea with a 438 km conveyance north to Amman; it is the largest infrastructure project in Jordan’s history. The final technical and legal agreements were signed in April 2026, with financial close targeted for July and still pending in September. Capital cost is about US$4.3 billion, or US$5.8 billion once financing is counted. The structure is a build-operate-transfer concession, under which the private side builds the works, runs them for an agreed period and hands them over. Meridiam and SUEZ hold the project company, with Vinci and Orascom building. Ground preparation has started. First water is planned around the end of the decade; until then, every dry year must be bridged from storage, wells and rationing.⁶

Estimates of current losses through water-supply network leakage are as high as 50%.Al-Ansari et al., on Jordan's network losses

The flagship projects

The Disi Water Conveyance Project transports water some 325 km from a fossil aquifer on the Saudi border to Amman and the northern cities. Operational since 2013 at a total project cost its US lender put at US$987.6 million, it supplies roughly 100 MCM/yr. Because the aquifer is shared with Saudi Arabia, a 2015 agreement restricts it to domestic use, a real constraint, since the obvious alternative would have been irrigation.⁸

The carrier itself grew out of the earlier Red Sea–Dead Sea concept, which would have used the same Aqaba intake to slow the Dead Sea's fall as well as supply drinking water. That version was shelved. Financing for the scheme now under way comes from AIIB, EBRD, KfW, AFD and the Green Climate Fund. Published cost figures vary: around US$2.3 billion was reported at the 2025 concession award, against the US$4.3 billion quoted at signing in 2026. The two are not stated on the same basis, so they are best not compared directly.⁶

The asset base in numbers

Sources: FAO AQUASTAT regional dam inventories (CC BY 4.0), which list large dams with a published capacity and can lag recent construction; the MENA Water Review major projects register, where each record cites its source on the project page. The database follows large contracted projects, not the whole asset base.

Overexploitation has degraded groundwater quality. Many municipal and irrigation well fields have been abandoned, Dhuleil among them.¹⁰ The Disi aquifer, which supplies Amman through a 325 km pipeline, carries natural radioactivity. A 2009 study led by Avner Vengosh of Duke University sampled 37 wells and found radium above WHO levels in all but one.¹⁴ Reports of the peak values differ, from up to 20 to 30 times the international thresholds.¹⁴¹⁵ The water is blended with other sources to reduce the radiation.¹⁶

The Zarqa and the lower Jordan

The Zarqa River runs 72 km through Amman and Zarqa to King Talal Dam. Its pollution comes mainly from chemical spills by upstream factories and from sewage. Farms along it irrigate with the polluted water.¹⁷ The river passes through an area holding more than 85% of Jordan's industrial plants.¹⁸ The As-Samra plant upstream treats nearly 70% of the country's wastewater. A US$28 million expansion was signed in July 2026.¹⁹

The lower Jordan River has lost 95% of its historical flow in 50 years, EcoPeace's director said in 2022. It has become a channel for waste, raw sewage, saline water and fishpond discharge.²⁰ The 1994 peace treaty obliged Israel and Jordan to stop discharging untreated wastewater into the Yarmouk and the Jordan within three years.²¹ The 1987 agreement with Syria contains no water-quality provisions at all.²²

Reuse is where Jordan leads the region. In the mid-2000s more than 80% of Greater Amman's sewage was treated and released to the Zarqa, then stored at King Talal Dam to irrigate the middle Jordan Valley.¹⁰ In 2006, 98% of the population had access to improved drinking water. The health ministry is responsible for its safety.¹⁰

The reported indicators

Sources: WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme via the World Bank; SDG 6.3.1 and 6.3.2 from the UN Statistics Division SDG database, retrieved September 2026. Safely managed means an improved source on the premises, available when needed and free from priority contamination. SDG 6.3.2 rests on each country’s own monitoring network, so a high share can mean few water bodies were assessed, and values move when methods change between reporting rounds.

About 26% of Jordan's water resources are shared with neighbours, on the ministry's figures. UNECE puts the figure for freshwater at around 40%.¹¹²³ Every major source crosses a border: the Yarmouk from Syria, the Jordan with Israel, and the Disi aquifer with Saudi Arabia.

The Yarmouk and Syria

Jordan and Syria signed their first Yarmouk agreement in Damascus on 4 June 1953. It planned a joint dam at Maqarin, with Jordan bearing 95% of construction costs and Syria taking 75% of the electricity.²⁴ A new agreement, signed in Amman on 3 September 1987, replaced it. Jordan would finance the Wahdah dam, but the dam could store water only after 26 Syrian reservoirs listed in the annex, holding 134 MCM, had filled.²⁵²²

Upstream use outran the treaty. Satellite analysis identified 32 Syrian dams in the basin holding an estimated 197 MCM.²² The Yarmouk's average flow at the Jordanian border fell from 229 MCM a year in 1979–88 to about 40 MCM in 2008–15.²² The Wahdah (Unity) Dam, designed for 225 MCM, was cut to 110 MCM in 2003 and completed in 2006 without its power station.¹⁰²² In July 2022 water expert Dureid Mahasneh put its contents at no more than 10–15 MCM, and Syria turned down Jordan's request for 30 MCM.²⁶

The change of government in Damascus reopened the file. In July 2025 a joint technical committee met at the dam, and Syria said it was ready to re-examine the 1987 shares.²⁷ In April 2026 the two states launched a study of the basin with Swiss support and a joint platform for water data.²⁸²⁹

Israel: the treaty and the add-ons

The 1955 Johnston Plan would have given Jordan 55% of the basin's water, but it was never signed.¹⁰ Water became a front line instead. In 1969 Israel attacked the East Ghor Canal on suspicion that Jordan was diverting too much.¹⁰

The 1994 peace treaty settled allocations in Annex II. Israel pumps 12 MCM from the Yarmouk in summer and 13 MCM in winter. It takes an extra 20 MCM in winter, in exchange for 20 MCM of Jordan River water delivered to Jordan in summer. Both sides undertook to find a further 50 MCM a year of drinking water.²¹ Practice has departed from the text. Jordanian records show Israel pumping about 47 MCM a year from Lake Tiberias to the King Abdullah Canal, more than twice the 20 MCM in the treaty. Israel alone uses the excess flood flows.²²

In July 2021 the two foreign ministers agreed that Jordan would buy an extra 50 MCM a year.³⁰ Israel renewed the deal in six-month steps, but it lapsed at the end of 2025.³¹³² In July 2026 Israel reportedly tied renewal to Jordan moderating its rhetoric and restoring full diplomatic ties.³³ An IMF report put the loss to Amman at 50 MCM a year.¹¹

Deals that did not survive

Two larger schemes failed. Jordan and Israel agreed in 2013 and 2015 to pipe Red Sea water north, sending part of it on to the Dead Sea.³⁴³⁵ On 17 June 2021 Jordan withdrew, concluding there was no real desire for the project on the Israeli side.³⁴ On 22 November 2021 Israel, Jordan and the UAE signed a declaration in Dubai. Jordanian solar power of 600 MW would be swapped for up to 200 MCM a year of Israeli desalinated water.³⁶ Hundreds protested in Amman.³⁷ On 16 November 2023 Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said Jordan would not sign, because of the war in Gaza.³⁸

The Disi aquifer and Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia expanded extraction from the shared Saq–Disi aquifer in the 1980s to grow wheat. Its withdrawals were estimated at over 1,000 MCM in 2008. Jordan draws some 60 MCM for farming near the border.³⁹ Its Disi conveyance was designed to pump 100 MCM a year to Amman through a 325 km pipeline.¹⁴ On 30 April 2015 the two states signed an agreement in Riyadh. It bans groundwater-dependent activity in a protected zone within five years, limits use in a wider management zone to municipal supply, and creates a joint technical committee.⁴⁰ It sets no numerical limit on extraction.³⁹

The Dead Sea

The Jordan once carried about 1.3 billion m³ a year into the Dead Sea. A 2013 UN-ESCWA estimate put the flow at 20–200 MCM.⁴¹ The Dead Sea fell from about 398 m below sea level in 1976 to about 430 m in 2015, and more than 1,000 sinkholes appeared in 15 years.⁴² At COP27 in November 2022 Israel and Jordan signed a declaration on restoring the river.²⁰ In February 2026 Jordan joined the UN Water Convention, the second Middle Eastern state after Iraq.²³

The record

Shared river basins

The register also places small areas of Jordan in the Tigris-Euphrates/Shatt al Arab basin, too little to carry here.

Cooperation and conflict on the record, 1948 to 2008

The International Water Events Database scores every reported interaction between riparian states on the Basins at Risk scale, from formal war over water to voluntary unification. Cooperative and conflictive events add up to less than 100% because neutral events are counted too.

Source: Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database, International Water Events Database, Oregon State University, as compiled by the Transboundary Waters Atlas. The series ends in 2008; every later dispute and agreement is outside it and is covered in the text above.

The agreements

Source: Master Treaties Database of the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (February 2023 edition), via the Transboundary Waters Atlas. Titles as recorded, with spelling normalised. Colonial-era boundary instruments appear because they fixed water rights on rivers that later became international.

Joint bodies

• Joint Syrio-Jordanian Commission (JSJC)Jordan · 1953 · Jordan, Syria
• Joint Water Committee between Jordan and Israel (JWC3)Jordan · 1994 · Israel, Jordan

Source: the river basin organisation database of the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (2013). A joint body on paper is not evidence that it meets.

Shared aquifers

• Arava Valley / Wadi Araba Alluvial AquiferIsrael · data moderate
• Basalt Aquifer System (South): Azraq-Dhuleil BasinSyria · data good
• Basalt Aquifer System (West): Yarmouk BasinSyria · data good
• Saq-Ram Aquifer System (West) / DisiSaudi Arabia · data good
• Tawil Quaternary Aquifer System: Wadi Sirhan BasinSaudi Arabia · data good

Source: IGRAC and UNESCO, Transboundary Aquifers of the World. Data reliability is IGRAC’s own assessment of the information behind each outline.

The Ministry of Water and Irrigation (MWI) sets policy and oversees the sector. Under it, the Water Authority of Jordan runs water and wastewater, and the Jordan Valley Authority manages the valley's irrigation. Service delivery runs through utilities: Miyahuna serves Amman; Yarmouk and Aqaba Water cover their own regions. The private sector has taken on more of the work over the past two decades. As-Samra was delivered as a build-operate-transfer concession. The Aqaba–Amman carrier is structured as a public-private partnership, meaning the private side finances and operates the asset and sells the water to the state under a long contract.

Jordan's water future turns on four pressures. Climate change is reducing recharge and raising demand at once. Financial capacity is the second: the sector needs heavy investment while tariffs must remain affordable to households that already struggle to pay them. Transboundary reliability is the third, and the one Jordan controls least. Efficiency is the fourth, and the cheapest of the four to address, since the ~50% network losses are the fastest available win.

The National Water Strategy 2023–2040 frames the response: desalinate at Aqaba, expand reuse, cut losses, and move tariffs toward cost recovery. Three of the four are engineering problems; tariff reform is the one that tends to stall, in Jordan as elsewhere.