Environmental flows for the Mujib River, Jordan.

Environmental flows (e-flows) assessments are a powerful mechanism for enhancing and conserving the ecosystem goods and services rivers provide while allocating water to essential human use. There is a paucity of e-flows assessments and implementation in water scarce regions such as the Middle East, where limited freshwater resources are under extreme pressure.

GroundTruth, in conjunction with Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN) members, undertook a research and training project in Jordan that aimed, 1) to provide in-person capacity building within RSCN members for e-flows in-field surveys, and 2) to conduct a first e-flows assessment of the Mujib River, a vitally important freshwater resource for biodiversity and people in Jordan.

The e-flows assessment aimed to contribute towards monitoring the status of water resources, reviewing the ecological state of the river system, developing a vision for the resource, setting resource objectives, and ultimately informing a water allocation and management plan.

We employed a holistic approach based on the building block method, using expert knowledge, assessment and integration of the hydrology, hydraulics, fish, macroinvertebrates, vegetation, habitat integrity, and benthic diatoms of the Mujib River to undertake an e-flows determination.

Several significant threats to the ecology and fresh water supply in the Mujib River catchment were identified. The most significant were the absence of flooding and abstraction associated with upstream impoundments, as well as reliance on over-exploited and severely pressured groundwater-maintained flows.

This project developed a set of recommendations for management of the Mujib River that are designed to protect the water resources, and the associated ecosystem, but still allow for human-related use.

Overall, this project resulted in upskilled local researchers in Jordan and the first e-flows assessment for the Mujib River in Jordan, a vital step towards improved water resource monitoring and management in water scarce regions. Critically, it served to highlight the urgent global need for e-flows to preserve our critical freshwater systems.

After the project was completed, the research was published as a scientific paper in the international journal Ecohydrology:

Graham, P.M., Pattinson, N.B., Stassen, R., Pike, T., and Hamidan, N.A.F. 2024. Using environmental flows to inform integrated water resource management in critically water scarce regions. Ecoydrology, e2705. https://doi.org/10.1002/eco.2705

The Practitioner Points from this paper were:

• Freshwater systems in water-scarce regions require attention regarding monitoring and management via environmental flows (e-flows) for ecosystem health and human use.
• The Mujib River in Jordan is a critical freshwater resource that is currently in a largely natural to moderately modified ecological status and under threat from a variety of anthropogenic sources.
• This e-flows assessment of the Mujib River illustrates the socio-economic and environmental importance of freshwater systems in water scarce areas where relatively minor impacts can have large consequences.