Climate change in Cyprus: Battling drought

Environment

13.01.2009

Dossier index

Copenhagen 2009

Political will... or won´t
Carbon conscience
- Europe's satellite leads climate change study
Copenhagen atmosphere - the Euranet blog
Warming up?
- Climate change in Spain: Desertification
- The Consequences of Climate Change - the 2007 UN Report on Global Warming
- Climate change in the Netherlands: Flood protection
- Climate change in Cyprus: Battling drought
- Climate change in Slovenia: Rising snow lines

The sunny Mediterranean tourist resort of Cyprus is grappling with a problem that some in damper Northern European countries may have difficulty sympathising with. The island is chronically short of water, and some areas have received nothing more than a brief shower for more than four years. Water reserves are now at their lowest since 1908. As the holiday season gets underway Cyprus needs an additional 16 million cubic metres of water to see it through the summer.

Images
Audio

The Kouris Dam in the foothills of the Troodos Mountains is normally full, but since the drought it has run completely dry. Engineer Michaelis Televanathos, who helped design it, says: “When we looked back at the actual design criteria we used, and statistics for rainfall, we believed that after building the dam until the year 2010 we should have no water problem whatsoever.

“It is project that you build and you hope that it will solve a major problem. The weather has proved us wrong, dramatically wrong.”

The island’s archbishop and his clergy have led prayers for rain at churches across Cyprus for many months. Some argue these have now been answered, in the form of aid from Cyprus’s neighbour and longstanding ally Greece.

Every day for the next six months, a tanker will deliver 50,000 metres³ of drinking water to an undersea pipeline off the coast of Cyprus. If deliveries continue uninterrupted, the island’s deficit should have been made up by the end of December. These emergency measures have been masterminded by Sophocles Aletraris, head of the water development department.

“To be honest I’ve been working in this department for 30 years and this sounds like science fiction to me,” he says. “I never thought we would be so desperate, in such a bad situation in order to carry out such a project.

“But we have to understand that this is the fourth consecutive year that we are running with very low rainfall. We never thought that such a scenario could really exist.”

Cyprus’s farming community is particularly vulnerable. Resources are so stretched that none of the water shipped from Greece will be available to them, and farmers will be forced to adapt by planting drought-resistant strains of cereal. But this is only part of the solution – another option is desalination, which would make better use of sea water around Cyprus. The new plants will not be in use until 2009. Until then, both Cypriots and visitors to the island will have to depend on the daily tanker delivery from Greece.