The Director-General participates in the Palestinian-Dutch Academic Cooperation Conference on Water at Birzeit University, with a paper on the water and energy crisis in Gaza.
CMWU Participates in the First Conference of the Palestinian-Dutch Academic Cooperation Program on Water at Birzeit University
CMWU - Gaza
Eng. Monther Shoblaq, CMWU's Director-General, participated in the first conference of the Palestinian-Dutch Academic Cooperation Program on Water (PADUCO), organized by the Institute for Environmental and Water Studies at Birzeit University, in the presence of the university's Acting President Dr. Henry Jaqaman, His Excellency Water Authority Minister Dr. Mazen Ghanem, the representative of the Netherlands Representative Office in the Palestinian Territories Peter Molima, and a group of representatives from various ministries, authorities, and institutions related to the water sector, and a large number of academics and graduate students from Palestinian and Dutch universities.
The conference aims to strengthen the relationship between scientific research and decision-making regarding the priorities and needs of the Palestinian water sector, focusing on water and energy and private sector participation.
Eng. Monther Shoblaq, CMWU's Director-General, presented, in the first session of the conference, which continued for three days, a working paper titled "What Needs to Be Done to Address Gaza's Deteriorating Water and Provide Its Energy Needs," in which Shoblaq spoke about the geographic nature of the Gaza Strip and the nature of the groundwater aquifer layers and the sharp deterioration in water quality and quantity due to population growth and seawater intrusion, and pointed out that the water crisis in the Gaza Strip has reached a very critical situation, with the annual deficit ranging from 80 to 100 million cubic meters.
Shoblaq pointed to numerous other challenges facing the water sector, most notably the catastrophic shortage in energy supplies, the high operating and maintenance costs, and the low tariff compared to operating expenses, and affirmed that the continuous attacks on the Gaza Strip and the siege imposed on it are a major obstacle to projects aimed at developing the water and sanitation sector.
Shoblaq addressed the measures adopted and the ways to solve the water and wastewater crisis, through the short-term desalination plant project, which produces (13 million cubic meters per year), and developing it to reach a production of (55 million cubic meters per year), and importing additional quantities of water from the Israeli side (16 million cubic meters per year), and treating wastewater and using it in agriculture and injecting it into the ground, in order to reduce the depletion of groundwater aquifer water, and also developing the Gaza power plant and increasing the quantity of electricity coming through the regional network from Egypt and from the Israeli side, and at the institutional level he addressed the measures taken by CMWU in cooperation with the Water Authority and municipalities to improve the efficiency, management, and provision of water and sanitation services and strengthen the institution's organizational capacities, such as structuring the newly established facilities and improving network efficiency and water quality.
The conference discussed the opportunities and challenges facing the water sector by raising several topics, the most prominent of which were water management and governance, water management amid scarcity and climate change, innovations in the field of wastewater treatment and reuse, seawater desalination, artificial groundwater recharge, the role of the public and private sectors in managing water and non-traditional water resources, agricultural management and the impact of water scarcity and climate change on agricultural production, and also water pollution and health risks associated with pollution.
In the conference's final session, the participants came out with several recommendations, the most important of which was that the various activities of the Palestinian-Dutch University Partnership Project (PADUCO) focus on the problems of the Palestinian water sector, with the necessity of expanding the coalition to include universities from the Gaza Strip and networking between academic institutions and decision-making institutions represented by the relevant ministries, the Palestinian Water Authority, the Palestinian Water Sector Regulatory Council, and civil society institutions, and the necessity that training programs include practical applications and provide accurate, up-to-date data for researchers and private sector support for scientific research in order to encourage excellence and innovation, and the urgent need to research the relationship between the water, agriculture, and food security sectors in Palestine and research issues related to international laws, water rights, governance, and economics was also affirmed.
