Water management in the Lower Jordan Valley

A regional question with local consequences

The original SMART research involved partners from Germany, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Territories. Its purpose was to investigate integrated approaches to a region where water availability, water quality, ecosystems and competing uses are closely connected.

Regional planning and local implementation require different scales of evidence. A catchment model may describe water availability, while a village treatment scheme depends on collection, access, operators and a workable reuse or discharge route.

Read the landscape through its sources

Groundwater, surface runoff, treated wastewater and brackish water offer different opportunities and constraints. They also interact. An intervention affecting one source may change flows or quality elsewhere.

That is why integrated management is more than a list of technologies. It requires an account of who uses the water, how it moves through the system, and which environmental and institutional conditions apply.

Three ways into the research

1. Fuheis: decentralised wastewater treatment and reuse demonstrations.
2. Wala: reservoir water, recharge and the groundwater system.
3. Jericho–Auja: linking water-resource assessment to planning and decision support.

These are historical research case studies. They are not current visitor information, service offers or statements that the same facilities and arrangements continue to operate unchanged.

Use current policy alongside historical research

Jordan's Ministry of Water and Irrigation publishes the National Water Strategy 2023–2040 and other strategic plans. Read the current official documents for the policy context, and the SMART reports for the research evidence from their period. Do not treat an old project brochure as a statement of today's regulations or infrastructure status.

A note about this edition

The interactive drawings on this website explain processes. They are schematic, not survey maps, boundary maps or live monitoring feeds. Where a numerical example is illustrative, it is identified as such. The library preserves the original documents so that readers can inspect methods, authorship and context themselves.