Amman
The second-driest country's capital gets water 36 hours a week while absorbing every regional war's refugees — a sponge in a shrinking tidal pool, succeeding at something unsustainable.
Amman receives household water for 36 hours per week. Jordan is the second-driest country on Earth, with 61 cubic metres of renewable freshwater per person per year — one-eighth of the internationally recognised 'absolute water scarcity' threshold. Over 90% of rainfall evaporates before it can be captured, and aquifers are pumped at twice their natural replenishment rate.
Into this water-stressed environment, every regional conflict sends another wave of people. Palestinian refugees after 1948 and 1967. Gulf War returnees in 1991. Iraqis after the 2003 invasion. Over a million Syrians since 2011. Jordan's population has grown from 400,000 in 1946 to over 11 million, roughly doubling in the past decade alone. Amman has absorbed most of this growth, expanding from a small administrative town into a sprawling capital where every new arrival dilutes the per-capita water supply further.
Jordan has 61 cubic metres of freshwater per person per year — one-eighth of the absolute scarcity line — and every regional war sends another million people to Amman.
The biological parallel is a sponge in a drying tidal pool: the organism absorbs whatever arrives, but the pool itself is shrinking. By 2030, projections suggest over 90% of Jordan's low-income population will face critical water insecurity. Water scarcity already drives up energy costs — pumping from depleting aquifers requires an estimated 40% more energy by 2040 — creating a resource spiral where solving one shortage worsens another.
Jordan's response is infrastructure at civilisation scale. The Aqaba-Amman Water Desalination and Conveyance project will pump desalinated Red Sea water 350 kilometres uphill to the capital — designed to become the world's largest seawater desalination facility. Jordan has also negotiated a water-for-energy swap with Israel: 600 megawatts of Jordanian solar power in exchange for 200 million cubic metres of desalinated water.
These solutions reveal the trap. Every infrastructure investment makes Amman more capable of absorbing the next wave of refugees, which attracts more people, which strains the very infrastructure built to accommodate them. The city grows because it can absorb crises, and it must keep growing its capacity because it keeps absorbing them. Amman is not failing — it is succeeding at something unsustainable.