Several years ago, I went through a guided tour of Jordan, and Petra. Petra is awesome Btw. However from Aman, where our tour started, the tour guide talked about the desert landscape while we were headed for Petra. He had said that the Ottoman Empire(?) In present day Turkey wanted a railway that connected to the rest of Europe. They built it through present day Jordan. In doing so, they harvested 1 million acres of woodland to be used in building the railway. In doing this, there were serious climate changes. What was once a lush forest became a desert, rainfall basically disappeared, creating the desert we know now. My question to any of the scholars out there. Were we (the other tourists and I) being fed a line bullshit or is this fact?
This thread on the ecological history of the fertile crescent (stretching from the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates river in Mesopotamia to the Jordan river valley in the Levant) might interest you. Unfortunately, it does not answer your specific question about whether or not the Ottoman Turks deforested parts of Jordan to construct a railroad.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4p4qt7/why_is_the_fertile_crescent_now_desert/