A Long Term View of Water and International Security¹

Water management is, by definition, conflict management. Postel (1999) describes the roots of the problem: Water, unlike other scarce, consumable resources, is used to fuel all facets of society, from biologies to economies to aesthetics and spiritual practice. Moreover, it fluctuates wildly in space and time, its management is usually fragmented, and it is often subject to vague, arcane, and/or contradictory legal principles. There is no such thing as managing water for a single purpose –all water management is multi-objective and based on navigating competing interests. Within a nation, these interests include domestic users, agriculturalists, hydropower generators, those seeking recreation, and environmentalists – any two of which are regularly at odds – and the chances of finding mutually acceptable solutions drop as more stakeholders are involved. Add international boundaries, and the chances decrease yet again. Surface and ground water that cross international boundaries present increased challenges to regional stability because hydrologic needs can often be overwhelmed by political considerations. While the potential for paralyzing disputes is especially high in these basins, history shows that water can catalyze dialogue and cooperation, even between especially contentious riparians. There are 263 rivers around the world that cross the boundaries of two or more nations, and an untold number of international ground water aquifers. The catchment areas that contribute to these rivers comprise approximately 47 percent of the land surface of the earth, include 40 percent of the world's population, and contribute almost 80 percent of fresh water flow (Figure 1) (Wolf et al. 1999). International river basins. In order to rigorously examine the history of water conflicts, researchers at Oregon State University undertook a three-year research project that attempted to compile a data set of every reported water-related interaction between two or more nations, whether incidents of conflict or cooperation, over the past 50 years (Wolf et al. 2003). The study documented more than 1,800 such interactions that involved water as a scarce and/or consumable resource or as a quantity to be managed – i.e., where water was the driver of the events.2 The study reached a number of conclusions. First, despite the potential for dispute in international basins, the record of cooperation historically overwhelms that of acute conflict over international water resources. During this time period, 157 treaties were negotiated and signed, as opposed to only 37 acute disputes. In fact, the only true “water war” between nations in the historical record occurred over 4,500 years ago, between the city-states of Lagash and Umma in the Tigris-Euphrates basin (Wolf et al. 2003). Second, despite the fiery rhetoric of politicians, often aimed at their own constituencies rather than at the enemy, most actions taken over water are mild. Third, nations find many more issues on which to cooperate with regard to water resources than to fight over. Fourth, water acts as both an irritant and as a unifier. As an irritant, water can make good relations bad and bad relations worse. But international waters can also unify basins where relatively strong institutions are in place. The historical record shows that international water disputes do get resolved, even among bitter enemies, and even as conflicts erupt over other issues. Some of the most vociferous enemies around the world have negotiated water agreements or are in the process of doing so. The institutions they have created frequently prove to be resilient over time and during periods of otherwise strained relations. The Mekong Committee, for example, has functioned since 1957, exchanging data throughout the Vietnam War. Secret “picnic table” talks have been held between Israel and Jordan since the unsuccessful Johnston negotiations of 1953-55, even though these neighbors were until only recently in a legal state of war. The Indus River Commission survived two wars between India and Pakistan. And all ten of the countries that share the banks of the Nile are currently involved in negotiations over cooperative development of the basin. So if there is little violence between nations over their shared waters, what's the problem? Is water actually a security concern at all? In those cases where water has caused or exacerbated tensions, it is worth understanding how it did so, in order to determine both how complications arise, and how they are eventually resolved. The first complicating factor leading to conflict is the length of time between when nations first start to impinge on each others' water planning and when agreements are finally, arduously, reached. A general pattern has emerged for international basins over time. Countries that share access to a basin tend to first implement water-development projects unilaterally, on water within their territory, in order to avoid the political intricacies of jointly managing the shared resource. At some point, one of the countries, generally the most powerful, will implement a project that impacts at least one of its neighbors. This project can, in the absence of relations or institutions conducive to conflict resolution, become a flashpoint, heightening tensions and creating regional instability that require years or, more commonly, decades to resolve. Treaties over the Indus took ten years of negotiations, the Ganges thirty, and the Jordan forty. In the meantime, water quality and quantity degrades to the point that the health of dependent populations and ecosystems are damaged or destroyed. This problem gets worse as the dispute gains in intensity, as illustrated by the ecosystems of the lower Nile, the lower Jordan, and the tributaries of the Aral Sea, all of which have fallen casualty to overuse upriver and to the intractability of international disputes. During these periods, threats and disputes rage across boundaries, like those between Indians and Pakistanis and between Americans and Canadians. A perhaps even more important set of disputes, however, takes place at the subnational level. Irrigators, indigenous populations, and environmentalists, for example, often see water as tied to their very way of life, increasingly threatened by newer uses for cities and hydropower. Numerous violent incidents have occurred at the sub-national level, generally between tribes, water-use sectors, or states/provinces. In fact, our recent research at Oregon State suggests that as the level at which the dispute occurs descends towards the locality, the likelihood and intensity of violence goes up (Giordano et al. 2002). The many examples of internal water conflicts range from interstate violence and death along the Cauvery River in India, to California farmers blowing up a pipeline meant for Los Angeles, to clashes between Chinese farmers and police in Shandong in 2000 in response to government plans to divert irrigation water to cities and industries. As water quality degrades or quantity diminishes over time, the effect on the stability of a region can be unsettling. For example, for the thirty years that the Gaza Strip was under Israeli occupation, water quality deteriorated steadily. Salt water intrusion degraded local wells, and water-related diseases took a rising toll on the people living there. In 1987, the Palestinian uprising known as the Intifada broke out in the Gaza Strip, and quickly spread throughout the West Bank. While it would be simplistic to claim that water quality was a direct cause of the conflict, it was undoubtedly an irritant exacerbating an already tenuous situation. Two-thirds or more of the world's water use is dedicated to agriculture, so when access to irrigation water is threatened, one result can be mass migrations of out-of-work, disgruntled men from the countryside to the cities – invariably a recipe for political instability. In pioneering work, Sandra Postel identified those countries that rely heavily on irrigation and whose agricultural water supplies are threatened either by a decline in quality or quantity. The list includes many of the world's current security concerns, including India, China, Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, Iraq, and Egypt. A common assumption holds that scarcity of a critical resource drives people to conflict. It feels intuitive: The less there is of something, especially something as important as water, the more dear it is held and the more likely people are to fight over it. Once again, though, our study at Oregon State found conclusions that were counter-intuitive. Arid climates harbored no more conflicts than humid climates, for instance, and international cooperation actually increased during droughts. In fact, when we ran the numbers, none of the “obvious” variables proved decisive: Democracies engaged in water conflict as often as autocracies, rich countries as often poor countries, densely populated countries as often sparsely populated ones, and large countries as often as small ones. A more central variable, it turned out, was the strength of institutions for dealing with shared water resources. If naturally arid countries tended to be more cooperative, it was due to the institutional strategies necessary for adapting to water-scarce environments. Once we began to focus on institutions – whether defined by formal treaties, informal working groups, or generally warm relations – we began to get a clearer picture of the settings most conducive to solving political tensions over international waters, and those that are less favorable. We found that the likelihood of conflict increases significantly whenever two factors come into play. The first is any large or rapid change that occurs either in the basin's physical setting (typically the construction of a dam, river diversion, or irrigation scheme), or in its political setting (especially the breakup of a nation that results in new international rivers). The second factor is the inability of existing institutions to absorb and effectively manage that change. This is typically the case when there is neither any treaty spelling out each nation's rights and responsibilities with regard to the shared river, nor any implicit agreements or cooperative arrangements. Even the existence of technical working groups can provide some capability to manage contentious issues, as they have in the Middle East. The overarching lesson of our study is that unilateral actions to construct a dam or river diversion in the absence of a treaty or other protective international mechanism is highly destabilizing to a region, often spurring decades of hostility before cooperation is pursued. In other words, the red flag for water-related tension between countries is not water stress per se, but rather the unilateral exercise of domination of an international river, usually by a regional power. Some aspects of the future will probably look very similar to the present, especially the potential for the global wealthy to be able to adapt to change, while the poor will not. Consider for example, the problem of flooding in the Netherlands versus in Bangladesh. Both are low lying countries with little topography, and both are subject to the hazards of flooding potentially exacerbated by rising sea levels. Multi-million dollar sea-walls are built to protect the Netherlands, with the result that flood-related deaths and damage are negligible, while every year thousands die amid wide-spread devastation in Bangladesh. Similarly, few suffer from the effects of water shortage in the more-wealthy world, while 2.2 to 5 million people die every year in the developing world from water-related causes (Gleick 1996). While there are gains to access to drinking water and sanitation, in the less-wealthy world, people will continue to suffer and die at unprecedented rates, and ecosystem degradation will continue at alarming rates. Yet, the entire basis of the Oregon State study rests on the not unassailable assumption that we can tell something about the future by looking at the past. It is worth stopping at this point, then, and challenging the very foundation of that assumption: Why might the future look nothing at all like the past? What new approaches or technologies are on the horizon to change or ameliorate the risk to the basins we have identified, or even to the whole approach to basins at risk? By definition, a discussion of the future can not have the same empirical backing as a historical study – the data just are not there yet. 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