The Dead Sea, nestled where Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian territory meet, has famously been dying for years. The shrinking sea's highly salty waters are rapidly retreating due to industrial use and climate change, which is accelerating their natural evaporation. With war raging in the Middle East, efforts to tackle this ever-worsening ecological disaster appear to have dissolved, too. The Israeli government claims it is looking into several solutions, including building a desalination facility and forging a canal from either the north or the south to address the general water shortages in the region, including the Dead Sea.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00That sea has been declining over one meter per year since the 1960s when we started water
00:15diversions from Israel, Syria, and Jordan.
00:20And the consequences of this water diversion is what we see around us is ecological disaster.
00:29As we can see here, it just appeared at the studio about 40 years ago and see where the
00:34pier is and where the water level is.
00:37So we are in actually a disaster zone.
00:46The thing is that there are probably better things on the government's mind, especially
00:53in a time of war than the Dead Sea.
00:57This is a failure of all Israeli governments throughout the history of the country.
01:02And not only Israel, also Jordan, Syria, and the conflicts that were around it contributes
01:09to it.
01:10The river, the Dead Sea, is still declining because it is not a regional effort.
01:17Regional cooperation is the key in order to save the Dead Sea.
01:23The region needs desperately more drinking water, more water for agriculture.
01:29And that's why we need to combine a desalination plant together with the Dead Sea canal.
01:46We are focusing on the Israeli side, mainly on environmental damages in the Israeli side.
01:54And we are hoping for collaborations in the issue of the Dead Sea canal in the future.
02:02But this depends on collaboration.
02:05We can't do it alone.
02:06It must be a joint effort.
02:09So only time will tell.
02:16For more UN videos visit www.un.org