Jordan rehabilitates its vast degraded Badia region at the micro scale

Jordan’s arid and degraded Badia region covers nearly 90% of the country’s area and hosts over 60% of its livestock. In collaboration with the National Agricultural Research Center (NARC), the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE) and International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) have developed a new way to identify potentially suitable areas for rehabilitation of watersheds, and the Jordanian government is rolling out community-based, mechanized, micro water harvesting packages over at least 1,000 hectares of agro-pastures a year.

Traditionally, assessment of suitability for watershed rehabilitation has relied on mapping Geographic Information System (GIS) layers, for example for climate, topography, soil and land use. However, this static methodology does not account for more dynamic criteria such as the surface water that is available for harvesting at any given time. WLE/ICARDA therefore developed a new methodology that combines GIS data with a…

Photo credit: Seersa Abaza/IWMI