Reviewing the 1994, 1997, and 2002 Agreements on the Orontes River: Is Lebanon’s Share Fair and Equitable?

Abstract

In the age of the Anthropocene, humanity’s access to and sustainable use of water resources have increasingly become objects of concern. One factor complicating this is when water resources flow across borders. Covering nearly half of Earth’s surface, such transboundary river basins are shared by two or more states. Treaties on the use of these basins range from coercive to cooperative, reflecting various conceptualizations of sovereignty.

Lebanon is home to a major transboundary watercourse: the Orontes River. The Orontes originates in Lebanon, flowing in a northerly direction through Syria and Turkey before discharging into the Mediterranean. A series of treaties between Lebanon and Syria on the use of the river’s flows emerged in the mid 1990s, being reformed twice to result in a finalized 2002 agreement allocating Lebanon 96 million cubic meters (MCM) out of 403 MCM measured at the Hermel Bridge gauge. This project seeks an answer to the question of whether these treaties allocate Lebanon a share of water that can be considered “fair and equitable.” Focusing on the area south of Ar-Rastan, Syria, remote sensing is used alongside available data to estimate the riparians’ consumptive use of the Orontes’ flows. Potential water rights allocations (WRAs) are constructed for the distribution of the river’s flows between the two riparians, each emphasizing different statistics as espoused by Dinar and Nigatu (2013), Dinar and Tsur (2017) and the 1997 UNWC. These WRAs emphasize practical and actionable solutions to the question of improving the final 2002 agreement.

Through a study on the Orontes Basin south of Ar-Rastan, this project aims to contribute to the growing literature on transboundary watercourse governance, providing a platform from which various principles related to the distribution of transboundary water in the age of the Anthropocene can be compared and contrasted.