- by Graham Holton
- The Guardian
- Issue #2178
Israel is sometimes portrayed as a global leader in large-scale seawater desalination, but its projects have created significant environmental problems, mainly along the country’s coastal ecosystems. The Ashkelon, Hadera, Sorek, Palmachim, and Ashdod plants are increasing ecological damage by increasing salinity along outpour areas, which stresses marine organisms not able to adapt to high salinity. The concentrated brine output is warmer than local seawater, creating thermal pollution. The dumped saline water damages ecosystems by reducing oxygen levels, affecting fish, invertebrates, and seagrass, especially slow-growing species
Much of the fresh water from desalination plants is dumped into the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret) with ecological, chemical, and political consequences. This dilutes the surface salinity of the lake, which interferes with the natural process of adjusting, putting a stress on fish and other animals that have adapted to the lake’s conditions.
Desalination plants require extensive chemical treatment using chlorine and chloramines against biofouling, phosphonate-based anti-sealants use acids and coagulants, and heavy metals are leached from the infrastructure. These chemicals disrupt plankton populations, affect larval development of fish and molluscs, and accumulate in marine sediments.
Desalination and recycled water projects solve water scarcity but increase the environmental costs on marine ecosystems and the climate. Recycled water projects contain nitrates and phosphates, organic matter, agricultural runoff, and urban pollutants. This creates algal blooms, oxygen depletion at depth, fish die-offs, and a decline in water quality for drinking. The process Israel uses, reverse osmosis desalination, is energy-intensive. It relies on gas, which increases greenhouse gas emissions.
Israel presents desalination as a technical solution to its water scarcity. The economics of desalination projects rely on engineering, energy markets, finance, and political power. Desalination plants are highly capital-intensive. The typical costs of large-scale seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) are up to $2,136 per cubic meter per day of installed capacity. The cost of producing what Israel needs each year is around $2 billion per year. Desalination is among the world’s most expensive fresh water reclamation systems Desalination in Israel is only viable because the high energy costs are subsidised.
The Sea of Galilee feeds the Jordan River system, which has regional ecological importance and is politically sensitive for Jordan, Palestine, and Syria. From a political-ecology perspective, the impact is significant. Freshwater dumping is functioning as a symbolic fix, creating the appearance of “saving the lake,” while avoiding addressing the problems of over-extraction upstream. This masks structural water mismanagement and justifies continued high consumption elsewhere.
Desalination is not a technically neutral problem, for it influences political power, social inequality, and contests nature-society relationships. Political ecology questions: who benefits; who is marginalised; who bears the costs; who decides; and what alternatives there are.
Under Israel’s settler-colonialism, desalination is a tool of territorial consolidation, extending extractivism from the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee. Desalination reduces incentives for equitable water sharing across borders, as control over water infrastructure reinforces sovereignty claims. Occupied populations are excluded from desalinated supplies and paying higher prices, reinforcing their reliance on degraded natural sources.
What is needed is democratic governance of water infrastructure in Israel, to limit ecological damage from marine discharge, improve energy costs, prioritise fresh water redistribution, and to treat fresh water as a social-ecological right, not a political weapon.
