Water Resources

Every theme on this platform rests on the same physical base: how much water the region actually has, where it sits, and who else has a claim on it. The headline is stark. This is the world’s driest region, home to 6% of the world's population and less than 2% of its renewable water supply.¹ The detail matters more, because much of the significant water is shared, flowing in from outside, as the Nile and Euphrates do, or lying in aquifers that cross borders.

For Western Asia, the UN-ESCWA and BGR inventory maps what is shared. Its nine chapters on shared surface-water basins and seventeen on shared aquifer systems find more than 70% of the study area in a shared surface-water or groundwater basin, and most surface water shared and originating outside the region.² Two of its conclusions frame this whole hub. There is not a single basin-wide agreement on shared water in the Middle East, and there are no specific agreements on shared groundwater at all, though a few bilateral treaties carry groundwater clauses.² The satellite record supplies the trend line. Between January 2003 and December 2009, the Tigris, Euphrates and western Iran lost 143.6 km³ of stored fresh water, about 91 km³ of it groundwater.³

The spread is enormous. Counting inflows, Turkey has about 2,400 m³ of renewable water per person a year and Iran about 1,500; Kuwait generates none inside its borders and has about 4 m³ in all.⁴ Between them sit the river states, whose apparent abundance depends on upstream goodwill: on FAO’s dependency ratio, 98% of Egypt’s renewable water originates outside the country, 72% of Syria’s and 61% of Iraq’s.⁴ Below them all is the scarcity belt, from Jordan and Palestine to Yemen and the Gulf, living far under the 500 m³ absolute-scarcity line. The dashboard below maps total renewable water per person, including inflows from upstream (FAO AQUASTAT, 2023).⁴ The darker the country, the thinner the margin.

The hub's headline metric for all twenty countries. Hover, tap or focus a country; the ranked table sits alongside.

What each country has, and where it comes from

Ranked from the scarcest upward. Per-person figures are cubic metres a year in 2023. The last column is the share of a country’s renewable water that originates beyond its borders, which is the number that turns hydrology into diplomacy.

Twelve of the nineteen countries with a published figure withdraw more each year than their own territory renews.⁵ Egypt is the extreme: 77.5 km³ withdrawn against internal resources of about 1 km³, the arithmetic of a country living on a river that rises in other countries.^5 4 The World Bank prices the current path at 6 to 14% of regional GDP by 2050, and expects water per person to fall below the absolute-scarcity line by 2030.⁶ Agriculture takes 83% of the region’s withdrawals, against a world average of 70%.⁶ The denominator keeps shrinking: worldwide, FAO reports renewable water per person down a further 7% over the past decade.⁷

One case in this sector, examined in full.

Rivers, lakes, reservoirs and major dams across the region, drawn on the same layers as the Region Atlas. Hover a river, lake or dam for its name; zoom with the buttons, a pinch or ctrl-scroll.

Open the full atlas

Four kinds of water carry the region, and they behave differently enough that treating them as one supply is a planning error.

The great transboundary rivers

The Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, and the Jordan. The Lower Jordan is the end state: annual flow has fallen from more than 1.3 billion m³ to less than 30 million, with 96% of its fresh water diverted.⁸

The asymmetry is physical before it is political. Between 88% and 98% of the Euphrates’ runoff is produced in the highlands of south-eastern Turkey, while the Tigris draws an estimated 32 to 50% of its discharge there and the rest from Zagros tributaries in Iran and Iraq.⁹ According to Partow (2001), citing a 1997 estimate, Turkey’s planned dams would provide active storage equivalent to 137% of the Euphrates’ average annual discharge at the Turkish-Syrian border, and 92% of the Tigris’.⁹

Iraq is the clearest current case. Tigris and Euphrates flows run about 30% below their 1980 level.¹⁰ The Green Iraq Observatory put the country’s 2025 receipts at 35% of the share it claims.¹¹ National live storage fell to about 3.5 billion m³ before the 2025–26 winter and recovered to about 20 billion after it, which the United Nations calculates as roughly a quarter of what has been lost since 2020.¹⁰

Renewable aquifers

The highland and coastal groundwater that most cities and farms actually pump. It recharges, but in many basins it is abstracted well beyond safe yield, which converts a renewable resource into a depleting one.

Morocco’s Souss is the instructive record. One upstream piezometer fell 1.9 metres a year between 1998 and 2008 and 3.5 metres a year between 2012 and 2020, and across the basin the correlation between the rainfall index and the groundwater index is 0.07.¹² Rain is not what is driving that.

Fossil aquifers

The Nubian Sandstone beneath Egypt, Libya, Sudan and Chad, the Saq-Ram or Disi system shared by Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and the Umm er Radhuma beneath the Gulf. Vast, ancient and not meaningfully recharged at the depths being pumped, so anything taken is taken once.

The Saq-Ram sandstones cover about 560,000 km², 82,000 of them in Jordan and 478,000 in Saudi Arabia.¹³ The 2013 inventory recorded about 60 million m³ a year of abstraction in the Mudawwara-Disi area, mostly for farms, before the Disi conveyance, designed to supply Amman with a further 100 million m³ a year, came on line.¹³ The Saudi side shows what unmanaged mining looks like: abstraction around Tabuk rose from about 29 million m³ a year in 1983 to between 1,050 and 1,700 million by 2004, against recharge of 3 to 10 million, and water levels fell by up to 32 m a year in the late 1980s.¹³ The inventory’s own verdict is that the exploitable resource may be exhausted within 30 to 40 years unless abstraction is controlled on both sides of the border.¹³ A technical memorandum in 2007 barred new production wells within 10 km of that border, and a formal agreement followed in 2015. It sets protected and management zones along the border but no numerical limit on extraction.^13 14

Manufactured water

Desalination and treated reuse: the only part of the regional supply not limited by rainfall. It also moves water from a hydrological constraint to an industrial and financial one, which is a different kind of exposure rather than the absence of exposure.

The buffer behind it is thin. Qatar reported reserves equal to 5.2 days of supply in 2024, up from 1.3 days in 2010, and the UAE’s strategy targets national storage of up to two days.^15 16 A manufactured supply is only as secure as its power, its intakes and its politics.

Dependency is the system’s defining feature. On FAO’s accounting, Kuwait draws 100% of its renewable water from outside its borders, Egypt 98%, Bahrain 97%, Syria 72%, Iraq 61% and Israel 58%.⁴ Water diplomacy in this region is not a policy choice but a hydrological fact.

Where to read next, by situation:

Jordan (exemplar report: the full scarcity playbook), Egypt (one river, 118.4 million people in 2025), Iraq (upstream dependence in crisis), Yemen (groundwater emergency), Kuwait (life at about 4 m³ of renewable water per head), Turkey (the region's upstream water tower).

Three resource stories that define the era:

Wetlands are where a water budget becomes visible. Two of the region’s great ones were drained inside a single generation.

The Mesopotamian marshes covered 8,926 km² in 1973–76 and 1,297 km² by 2000, 14.5% of what they had been, with most of the loss falling between 1991 and 1995.⁹ The Central Marshes came down to 3% of their 1973 extent and Al Hammar to 6%.⁹ The economic loss ran downstream: FAO estimated in 1990 that 60% of Iraq’s inland fish catch came from the marshes, and up to 40% of Kuwait’s shrimp catch originates there.⁹ After 2003 Iraqis began demolishing the dikes and canals that had drained the marshes, and a 2006 UN Environment Programme assessment found roughly 58% of the marsh area of the mid-1970s restored.¹⁸ UNESCO inscribed the Ahwar of Southern Iraq in 2016.¹⁹

Jordan’s Azraq oasis shows the groundwater version of the same story. Discharge from the four springs that fed it ceased completely after a large well field was created in 1980.²⁰ Abstraction in the basin reached 215% of the 24 million m³ safe yield, from 960 wells drawing 51 million m³ in 2009; the Ministry of Water and Irrigation put it at about 2.7 times the safe yield in 2022.^20 21 Farms have been abandoned since 2004 as levels fell and salinity rose.²⁰ There are no formal water agreements for the basin, which Jordan shares with Syria.²⁰

The accounting and governance frameworks that matter here:

Reference overview; the diplomacy detail lives in the Conflict & Diplomacy hub.

The bodies that commission, regulate or deliver in this sector, and the names that recur across its tenders.

• Ministry of Water Resources (MoWR)Ministry · Iraq
• Ministry of Water Resources & Irrigation (MWRI)Ministry · Egypt
• Ministry of Water & Irrigation (MWI)Ministry · Jordan
• Arab Water CouncilRegional body · Regional
• UN-ESCWARegional body · Regional
• World BankDevelopment bank · Regional

Mandates, procurement routes and the rest of the region’s institutions are in the decision-maker directory.

The renewable base will not grow; the population will, from just over 100 million in 1960 to more than 450 million in 2018 and a forecast of more than 720 million by 2050.⁶ Closing the gap is arithmetic with four terms: desalinate, reuse, save, and import water as food.

The file to watch is groundwater. It is the buffer everything else leans on, and the satellite record shows it falling. Across Iran’s aquifers, satellite gravimetry shows an average depletion of 29 cm a year between 2002 and 2023.²² Globally, groundwater now accounts for 68% of the water lost from non-glaciated land, and dry regions are drying faster than wet ones are wetting.²³ The rivers add a second kind of risk: Nile modelling projects a 63% rise in the 100-year peak discharge in the twenty-first century under SSP2-4.5, and 85% under SSP5-8.5.²⁴

Standing references for this sector.

• FAO AQUASTAT, the standing database of national water resources, withdrawals and irrigated area. The denominator behind most figures on this site. fao.org
• World Resources Institute, Aqueduct 4.0 Current and Future Country Rankings (16 August 2023), indicator baseline water stress (bws), all sectors, 1979–2019. The source of the country water-stress categories used on this site (Low to Extremely high). Palestine has no value in it; the site shows our area-weighted calculation from the Aqueduct 4.0 sub-basin scores there instead, which is not Aqueduct’s demand-weighted method. The Aqueduct 4.0 Water Risk Atlas also supplies the sub-basin stress, depletion and drought-risk layers on the maps. wri.org
• World Bank, Beyond Scarcity: Water Security in the Middle East and North Africa (2017). The report frames the region’s water challenge as one of governance as well as scarcity. worldbank.org
• United Nations Iraq, Rain Brief (5 June 2026). Reservoir-by-reservoir storage after the 2025 to 2026 winter, and an unusually blunt account of what one wet year does not fix. iraq.un.org