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Cyprus Water Resources
Cyprus's water supply was both inadequate and
irregular. The
average rainfall of 500 mm, mostly in the winter, left the
island
quite dry much of the rest of the time because no rivers
flowed
year round. During the colonial period, a dam and
reservoir
construction program was begun, and by independence Cyprus
had
sixteen dams with a storage capacity of six million cubic
meters,
or 1 percent of the island's estimated 600 million cubic
meters of
usable runoff from annual rainfall.
After independence a number of large projects were
mounted to
increase reservoir storage capacity, which reached 300
million
cubic meters by 1990. The most important of these
projects, and the
largest development project in Cyprus since independence,
was the
Southern Conveyor Project, which collected surplus water
from the
southwestern part of the island and conveyed it by a
110-kilometer
long water carrier to the central and eastern areas. When
the
project reached completion in 1993, it, and a number of
other large
projects, would guarantee farmers and the inhabitants of
Nicosia
and other towns adequate amounts of water into the next
century.
Data as of January 1991
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