Too often, where we need water, we find guns…. As the global economy grows, so will its thirst…. Many more conflicts lie over the horizon.
—UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, 2008
Closely related to the word river is rival, originally “one who uses the same stream (or ‘one on the opposite side of the stream’)” … the notion is of the competitiveness of neighbors.
—the Online Etymology Dictionary
The last time one American state took up arms against another was over river water. In 1934, Arizona governor Benjamin Moeur dispatched National Guardsmen to patrol the Colorado River on two ferryboats armed with machine guns, dubbed “the Arizona Navy,” to stop the construction of Parker Dam and the “theft” of river water by California. In a stirring court case, the US Supreme Court ruled that California had acted illegally and halted construction of the dam. But the ruling was undone when Congress passed a retroactive bill legalizing California’s water expropriations. This ended the fight, if not the rancor, over the Colorado, which lingers today.
Although water-sharing agreements—such as the Delaware River Compact, which the Supreme Court brokered among New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—outnumber conflicts, plenty of states are waging water battles in the courtroom. Kansas and Nebraska have squared off over billions of gallons of water each wants from the Republican River. The US Supreme Court has appointed a special master to adjudicate Montana’s lawsuit that contends Wyoming violated terms of the Yellowstone River Compact of 1950 by pumping too much water from aquifers for use in coal-bed methane drilling. And Texas has warred with Oklahoma over the Kiamichi River.
Sometimes these skirmishes cross national boundaries. The five Great Lakes—Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie, and Ontario—contain about 90 percent of the fresh surface water in the United States and approximately one-fifth of the entire world’s supply. Some 42 million Americans and Canadians rely on the Great Lakes Basin water for their drinking supply; the waterways also play a crucial role in the region’s multibillion-dollar economy. In 1998 the Nova Group, a small Canadian consulting firm, announced its intention to withdraw 158 million gallons of water a year from Lake Superior and ship it by tanker to Asia. Permits were quickly issued by a local Ontario government office, but when word of the deal spread, officials from the eight US states bordering the lakes—already concerned about overuse, industrial pollution, and invasive species—agreed that a stringent set of rules to protect lake waters was necessary.
In 2008, after nearly a decade of discussion, the eight states and the provinces of Quebec and Ontario signed the Great Lakes Compact, to protect the lakes from large water withdrawals. President Bush signed the bill into law. But some, such as Michigan congressman Bart Stupak, opposed the bill because under the CHAPTER 11 provision of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—the 1994 trade agreement among the United States, Canada, and Mexico—if a foreign company believes its ability to conduct business is hindered by state law, it can sue for compensation, which could set off an international water dispute. Thus far, cooler heads have prevailed, though the potential for mischief is real.
Rivers, in particular, have the potential to be flashpoints because those upstream can control flows to those downstream. The UN has warned that strife over shared rivers—especially the Nile, Niger, Volta, and Zambezi—has the potential to erupt into armed conflict. Others have pointed to tensions over the Tigris and the Euphrates as a likely catalyst to violence. The rivers snake from the Turkish highlands down into Iraq and Syria, then out to the Persian Gulf; each of these nations has laid claim to the rivers.
In 1998, Turkey and Syria nearly went to war over water. When the United States invaded Iraq, much of Saddam’s infrastructure was destroyed, making the regional demand for water all the more acute. Matters have been vastly complicated by the rise of the Kurds, whose ancient homeland straddles the headwaters of the Tigris and the Euphrates, and who have emerged as a potent political force with US backing. A behind-the-scenes struggle has been under way among Turkey, Kurdistan, and Iraq (and the US forces there) over how to collect and distribute water from the Tigris-Euphrates systems in coming decades.
Water has been considered a lethal strategic weapon in Korea. South Korea was first gripped by a “water panic” in 1986, when the North built a massive dam on the Han River, which runs through Seoul, the South Korean capital. To protect itself, the South quickly countered by building the Peace Dam. Then, at two o’clock one morning in September 2009, North Korea opened the gates of a new dam on the Imjin River without warning, unleashing a fifteen-foot-tall wall of water, which swept into South Korea, creating a wide path of destruction and killing six people. It was unclear if the mercurial North had done so by accident or to provoke its neighbors.
Despite these riverine tensions, researchers at the London School of Economics say that rivers have historically provided a good example of “asymmetrical cooperation” between nations of different sizes and strengths.
The Nile is a vast river that has tributaries extending over a tenth of Africa’s surface, and a watershed that encompasses ten nations and 160 million people. The largest nations along the river—Egypt, Sudan, Uganda, and Ethiopia—hold the most sway, but these neighbors have spent centuries developing water-sharing agreements, and a water war is unlikely.
More worrisome is the prospect of an outsider’s disrupting the established order. China, for instance, has been negotiating with Ethiopia, which lies upstream of Egypt, for use of its agricultural land; one day, China might attempt to divert Nile water to the fields it plants in Ethiopia, which would almost certainly raise tensions.
Indeed, it is nations such as China, India, Pakistan, and the rising “Tigers” of Southeast Asia—nations finding economic success while faced with increasing demands for water and food—whose potential for conflict seems most real.
Whiskey’s for drinking, water’s for fighting.
—attributed to Mark Twain
The Chinese character for “political order” is based on the symbol for “water,” and the meaning is clear: those who control water control people. In 1950, China invaded Tibet in part to gain control of the water stored in its Himalayan glaciers. China is planning to create nearly two hundred miles of canals to divert water from the Himalayan plateau to the parched Yellow River. The fate of Himalayan snowmelt is particularly sensitive because it supplies the rivers that bring water to more than half a dozen Asian countries. A large-scale diversion of these waters will lead to a spike in regional tensions.
“Once this issue of water resources comes up—and it seems inevitable at this point that it will—it also raises emerging conflicts with India and Southeast Asia,” writes Elizabeth Economy, director for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Affairs.
Worldwide, a lack of water leads to low productivity, weak governments, and violent protests that can spill across borders. In 1995, Ismail Serageldin, the World Bank’s leading environmental expert, famously predicted that with 263 international river basins and 273 international aquifers “the wars of the next century will be over water.”
A 2008 report by International Alert, a peace-building organization based in London, identified forty-six countries with a combined population of 2.7 billion people where contention over water has created “a high risk of violent conflict” by 2025.
Thus far, actual wars over water are more difficult to pinpoint. In the 1980s and 1990s, a dramatic decrease in rainfall was blamed on overgrazing and tree cutting in Darfur, Sudan. Violence flared between farmers and nomadic herders of different tribes, leaving three hundred thousand dead and 2.5 million people displaced. But the war in Darfur, which continues to flare up, was the result of many complex ethnic, religious, and political factors and is not strictly a “water war.”
Similarly, droughts were arguably responsible—or, at least, were important contributing factors—for starting the Taliban uprising in Afghanistan and the Maoist insurgency in Nepal. But those conflicts also have complex roots, and neither is an example of a pure water war.
In researching water conflict, Dr. Aaron Wolf, of Oregon State University’s Institute for Water and Watersheds, found that the only actual water war recorded between nations occurred some forty-five hundred years ago, between the city-states of Lagash and Umma in the Tigris-Euphrates basin. Since the late 1940s, Wolf found, water-cooperative events have outnumbered water-conflictive events by 2.5 to 1, even in some of the world’s most unstable regions.
Nevertheless, diplomats at the UN remain concerned about the building tension around resources and have made water awareness one of the UN Development Goals, a list of initiatives that aim to reduce by half the number of people without safe drinking water by 2015.
It may be that the very thing causing tension between tribes or nations—that they share limited supplies of water while contending with increasing demand—proves the best inoculant against water wars in coming years. If one nation usurps or destroys a neighbor’s water supply, then it, too, will suffer, but if both nations work to share water fairly, then both will benefit.
When I spoke to him in 2007, Jan Eliasson, a former president of the UN General Assembly who has made water a personal cause while mediating disputes from Bosnia to Iran, had just returned from Darfur. “Water is one of the root causes of war there—not the only one, but a very important complicating factor,” he explained. “Water is crucial. If we could solve the situation logically, it would be through efforts to share irrigation and other resources. You have to get people out of their helplessness and hopelessness.”
There are historical models for this. From 1948 to 1994, while Israel and Jordan were technically at war, they continued to hold secret talks on cooperatively managing the Jordan River. While India and Pakistan have warred several times, the Indus River Commission has survived; during one of the wars, India continued to make payments to Pakistan as part of its treaty obligations.
“I think water hits us at a profoundly different level than other resources,” said Oregon State’s Dr. Wolf. “People are willing to do horrible things to each other. What they seem not willing to do is turn off each other’s water.”
Jan Eliasson fervently hopes this tenuous state can be maintained. “Water is the only indispensable liquid in the world,” he said. “Some people use it as a reason for conflict, but it can just as easily be used as a reason for cooperation. If world leaders are smart, they will see that an investment in water, and building an interdependence over water, is an investment in peace.”
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Water scarcity is of growing concern to the hydrologists, diplomats, and aid organizations worried about how climate change will impact water and food supplies. But an equally grave, though less publicized, concern is the way global warming will turn parts of the world wetter.
As temperatures rise, climatologists expect rainstorms to become more frequent and intense and sea levels to rise, making communities along waterways vulnerable to flooding. Floods lead to a host of serious problems: the threat of drowning, erosion, waterborne disease, loss of property, disruption of transportation routes, rampant pollution, and mass evacuations. Furthermore, rising tides and fiercer hurricanes will strain the world’s rickety hydro-infrastructure, much of which is in poor shape and was built at, or below, the twentieth century’s sea level.
In the first years of this century, unprecedented flooding in England has led to concern that the nation is ill equipped for the higher waters predicted for the future. And in the United States, climatologists warn that the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, considered “America’s worst environmental disaster,” was merely a foretaste of deluges to come.