 Thank you very much Dr. Barron. And again many will have questions please hold them you'll have a chance to raise them at the end of this session. And thank you very much to our presenters for keeping them in time that was that was perfect right on the money. Our second presentation will be given by Dr. Brian Joyce from SEI's US Center. Dr. Joyce is a hydrologist, received a PhD from Cal Davis and his research focuses on developing decision support tools for water resource systems. His recent work at SEI encompasses a great deal of use of wheat model to assess climate change impacts on water resource systems agriculture to design optimal approaches to meeting environmental flow requirements and to facilitate multi-party discussions over transboundary water resources issues. And Dr. Joyce will be presenting on the intersectoral economics of water in Palestine Israel and Jordan motivating improved equity and access to water. This describes a project designed to reduce the potential for conflict in a region that is you know inherently prone to conflict particularly over water by working directly with the regional governments to to restructure the approach by which scarce water is allocated. So Dr. Joyce. Thank you. So I'm going to give an overview of some of the work that we're doing with partners in the Middle East looking at the economics of water management there and potential benefits of cooperation. This is work that started with the NetHearBelie in the mid-90s and has been continuing intermittently on and off over since then and this is the the latest team of researchers at SEI that are working on the projects that I'll describe. Just to give you an overview of the water geography in the region everyone I'm assuming everyone knows where Israel is and that Jordan is the country that borders Israel on in the east and one of the the the Dead Sea then lies in between the two and informs the border along part of their their shared border and it's the as you probably know it's the lowest point on earth and however the the the water levels in the Dead Sea have been declining for many years now due to significant abstractions out of the Jordan River which flows from the north into the Dead Sea so one of the one of the the projects that's been discussed for several years now is to form is to is to build a pipeline out of the the Red Sea in the south desalinate that water and then pipe the the the tailwater the the effluent from that up into the Dead Sea to try to mitigate the declining levels there and just last month the the Israel Jordan and Palestine the governments of those countries have decided to move forward with this plan and it's debatable how how effective this will be but if nothing else it's a sign that these three countries can work together and and and and move forward in this managing the shared water resources there so we'll take that as a good sign however that the that project alone isn't likely to solve all of the problems within water management in these countries and more recently in the news Jordan and Palestine are looking to Israel to to buy from them some of their their desalinated water so there's there's certainly a need in the region for for increased cooperation among the countries for the managing their shared water resources I'll give a brief overview of each the situation within each country and then explain how we're working with them to address some of the management challenges individually in Israel Israel is has a control over the the upper watershed of the the Jordan River and as such they're able to they been able to develop a an extensive and sophisticated irrigated agriculture within the country and also to do to deliver water to the their to the people of Israel at a much higher level of reliability than either Jordan or Palestine are able to do and however the because of the the constraints on the water within the within the country they have been a leader in in the the development of innovations in water reuse and irrigation efficiency and they continue to seek innovative ways of managing their water the situation in Palestine by contrast is is quite different and that's that in the West West Bank in particular overlays the their main water source which is an aquifer the groundwater there which is the mountain aquifer according to the Oslo agreements for the early 1990s they have access to about only 20% of that which significantly limits their their access to water and their ability to to develop their their agricultural and industrial economies there as well the the households in in Palestine are reliant on receiving water from tanker trucks which I've shown in this picture here and those deliver water rather inconsistently or irregularly and the water from that is has been shown by researchers at SEI and Tufts University to be rather questionable and subject to bacterial contamination so there are serious health risks as well with the management of water in Palestine Jordan is somewhere in between and in the management of their resources and that they have full access over the water resources within the country they just don't have a whole lot of them they are the among the 10 most water scarce countries in the world despite this and however that they their the the pressure on their water resources has been extreme and particularly over the last 30 years since 1980 to 2010 that 30-year period the population within Jordan nearly tripled do you know in part to the influx of refugees from Iraq from the two conflicts there and more recently from Syrian refugees and despite all of this however about 97 percent of Jordanians do have access to improved water sources which is a significant achievement on the part of Jordan but they they continue to struggle with providing these services to to the to the country and as such they're now looking for innovative ways of managing the water resources looking at desalination and wastewater reuse so within each of these contexts we are working with partners there to develop tools to look at the economics of water management and and look and we've developed a tool called my was which is the multi-year water allocation system that's linked to the weep model that SI has developed and we take into account the the the water sources the water supply sources and the constraints on on those as well as the value that each user or sectors of users puts on the water that they that they receive so what are the demand curves of agriculture industry and and domestic water users and then taking all of that into account we use this tool to as an optimization for looking at the different water allocation schemes and for example you know what what are the impacts of introducing new infrastructure or different social policies looking at government subsidies and or how we're pricing water to motivate increased use of wastewater throughout the country and in through this process we hope that to introduce a more adaptive way of a planning and also to highlight the the trade-offs between how we're allocating water so we're we have three separate ongoing projects right now working with the governments in Palestine the Palestinian water authority as well as the Ministry of Agriculture there the Ministry of Water and Irrigation in Jordan and the Hebrew University and the Ministry of Agriculture in Israel so we have you know real a great window of opportunity right now I would say because we're working at a fairly high level within each of these governments to to move these projects forward and we hope that soon that we can bring these these three projects together in a way that we can then begin to explore the the benefits of cooperation so we're looking now at what are the what are some of the strategies that that we can look at and how they how they trade water among countries in a way that that produces win-win opportunities and I was really encouraged to hear from a speaker earlier this morning Ms. Petra our colleague from from CEDA who you know pointed out that really the the management of the shared management of the natural resources is a pathway to peace and I think that's certainly true here thank you