10/01/2018 Abstract submitted to AIS 2018 Annual Meeting by Shai ...

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Abstract submitted to AIS 2018 Annual Meeting by Shai Kassirer (PhD Student) from. University of Brighton, United Kingdom. Droughts and Desalination in Israel ...
10/01/2018 Abstract submitted to AIS 2018 Annual Meeting by Shai Kassirer (PhD Student) from University of Brighton, United Kingdom Droughts and Desalination in Israel (1989-2016): Newspaper Discourse of Water Scarcity from a Climate-Resilience and Politicization Perspective (17 words) Israel Meteorological Service forecasts winter 2017-18 to be the fifth consecutive drought season. This sequence of arid years joins the long droughts of 2004-2011 and 1999-2001, which increased existing national and regional tensions caused by already scarce water resources and brought Israel to develop its large-scale seawater desalination operation. Nowadays, desalination plants are contributing 80% of Israel’s domestic water consumption (about 40% of its total consumption). Israel is now a regional and global leader of desalination use and wastewater reuse for irrigation, and on its seventieth anniversary, it is considered to have achieved climate-resilience of its water sources. Yet, desalination is regarded within academic and political debate as a “game-changer” of the hydro-political and human-nature landscapes: besides promising a steady water supply, it has long-term implications including environmental, health, economic, political and geopolitical (Feitelson & Rosenthal, 2012; Swyngedouw & Williams, 2016). Given the complex implications of large-scale desalination, how did the Israeli Hebrew newspapers cover the causes and implications of these droughts and their solutions over the years? How were the competing environmental, economic and (geo)political aspects of desalination presented in news discourse? And, what was media’s role in the policy debate leading to the implementation of desalination? This presentation will introduce initial findings from a PhD project analyzing news-media coverage of droughts in Israel during 1989-2016. By using a climate-resilience perspective, it will ask what kind of resilience to the effects of climate change derives from desalination, and what are the dangers in depoliticization of desalination via news discourse? (250 words)

Feitelson, E., & Rosenthal, G. (2012). Desalination, space and power: The ramifications of Israel’s changing water geography. Geoforum, 43(2), 272–284. Swyngedouw, E., & Williams, J. (2016). From Spain’s hydro-deadlock to the desalination fix. Water International, 41(1), 54–73.