Sustainable desalination to meet the irrigation needs of farmers in the Jordan Valley

Water scarcity in the Jordan Valley is reaching acute levels as groundwater is becoming depleted and salinized. Many farmers are unable to irrigate their crops or are restricted to certain types of crops with suboptimal yields. This PhD project aims to provide a replicable solution for sustainable irrigation in the West Bank of the Jordan river, based on desalination technology developed at University of Birmingham in partnership with the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies (AIES) in Israel. This project also aims to implement the AIES ethos of "nature knows no borders", whereby British, Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian engineers are working together to help devise a novel method of groundwater desalination to help address the regional water crisis. It builds on the recent experience in an international undergraduate project supported by the Douglas Bomford Trust, the outcomes of which were reported in a plenary presentation at the conference of the European Desalination Society in Athens (Sept 2018), and are now being prepared for publication (H. Abu Ali et al., Desalination and Water Treatment, under review).