 In recent years the Israeli government has made extensive investments in water conservation, reclamation and desalination infrastructure in the country.This has allowed it to significantly reduce the amount of water pumped from the lake annually in an effort to restore and improve its ecological environment, as well as respond to some of the most extreme drought conditions in hundreds of years affecting the lake's intake basin since 1998.Therefore, it was expected that in 2016 only about of water would be drawn from the lake for Israeli domestic consumption, a small fraction of the amount typically drawn from the lake over the previous decades.