Lebanon: SPI-Water conclusions from the Litani River Basin

Litani River Authority (LRA) has a strategic importance for the South Bekaa and South Lebanon region, representing 40% of the total national area.

The most pressing water management issues of Litani RB identified in the SPI-Water Project are: pollution of surface and groundwater, overexploitation of groundwater and the lack of a basin wide approach to water management due to a missing institutional setting.

For a successful use of transferred knowledge to LRA it is absolutely necessary that the organisation has the mandate to implement the de-sired changes. The chosen priorities represent therefore a balance between the most urgent needs of the RB and the feasibility to successfully implement the new ideas.

Technical visits of LRA experts have been organised to Duero RB (Spain) and to several organisations in France where they learned about existing experiences regarding groundwater management and the institutional organisation of water management.
For each pressure identified LRA experts made a list of possible solutions based on their own experiences.

Afterwards they searched WISE-RTD web portal for references to similar topics and compared them with their own ideas. This approach allows to find a solution, which fits in the local situation and at the same time gains through experiences made in the EU. After evaluating the material found in the portal partners of the project
elaborated the following project proposals:

"Establishment of an aquifer contract" and Twinning project for the establishment of IWRM n the Litani river basin", keeping in mind the imited mandate of LRA.
Nevertheless, it was underlined by the partners that in the long term LRA must get the duties and mandate of a true River Basin Agency to implement IWRM principles and to effectively use the possibilities of knowledge transfer.