Has Technology Trumped Adaptive Management? A Review of Israel's Idiosyncratic Hydrological History

Adaptive management has been championed as an effective strategy for designing water policy and its implementation. An effective water management strategy, it is argued, must be adaptive and build in an ability to change management practices based on new experiences and insights. While such an approach was not part of official nomenclature, over the years, Israel’s water managers developed a nimble orientation, responding to available data, hydrological exigencies and emerging technological opportunities. This retroactive look at Israel’s water management history through this adaptive paradigm, identifies five distinct stages:Hydro-Socialism, Wastewater Reuse, Water Storage, Conservation and Demand Reduction. Although threats to a reliable supply remain, Israel’s water managers’ ability to adapt to numerous changes enabled a dryland country to flourish, with a highly productive agricultural sector and a plentiful and clean water supply for a rapidly growing population. Israel’s desalination plants are less subject to the stochastic variability of the climate. But Israel will still have to maintain an ‘adaptive management strategy’, albeit with less reason to monitor rainfall and more to monitor geopolitical and environmental threats to a sustainable water supply. © 2016 The White Horse Press.