Among the many countries suffering from severe water scarcity is Libya, which has a lack of natural water reserves such as rivers.
In the 1960s, the country’s government tried to tackle the water stress issue through desalination.
Upon the beginning of the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan government pivoted its attention to transporting deep aquifers in the southern regions of the country to the coastal area, where the majority of Libyans live.
This led to the conception of the Great Man-Made River (GMMR), a massive engineering feat believed to be the world’s largest irrigation project.
The budget estimate for this project is claimed to have been between $20bn to $25bn (£15.7bn to £19.6bn), although the exact amount spent remains unclear.
Gaddafi, who laid the foundation stone for the commencement of the construction of the project in August 1984, hailed the GMMR the “eighth Wonder of the World”.
The network of pipes supplying fresh water through Libya has so far been developed in three phases.
Using a pipeline system pumping water from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System into the populous cities on the Mediterranean coast, the GMMR currently covers a distance of up to 994 miles.
The underground network of pipes and aqueducts includes 1,300 wells, many of which are deeper than 1640 feet underground.
The fourth and fifth phases of the project include an extension of the networks created during the first phase of the project as well as a pipeline connecting the systems created during phases one and two.
The completion of these phases could bring the total capacity of the GMMR to the delivery of 230 million cubic feet of water per day and would include 2,500 miles of pipelines.
The pipes themselves have been tipped to be record-breaking. The 250,000 sections of pipe laid during the first phase of the project reportedly had a diameter of 13 feet and a length of 23 feet, the largest in the world at the time.
The size of the underground reservoirs has led some Libyan officials to claim the GMMR could supply water for thousands of years, but critics believe similar claims are greatly overstated.
