What are the security issues?

The discussion above addresses international armed conflict and water as a scarce resource. Internal disputes, such as those between interests or states/provinces, have not been mentioned, nor have situations where water was a means, method, or victim of warfare. It is important to understand there is history of water-related violence – it is a history of incidents at the sub-national level, generally between tribes, water-use sectors, or states/provinces. In fact, there are many examples of internal water conflicts ranging from interstate violence and death along the Cauvery River in India, to California farmers blowing up a pipeline meant for Los Angeles, to much of the violent history in the Americas between indigenous peoples and European settlers. In the United States, the desert-state of Arizona even commissioned a navy (one ferryboat) and sent its state militia to stop a dam and diversion on the Colorado River in 1934.

The conceptualization of “environmental security,” however, is moving beyond a presumed causal relationship between environmental stress and violent conflict to a broader notion of “human security” – a more inclusive concept focusing on the intricate sets of relationships between environment and society. While these disputes can and do occur at the sub-national level, the human security issue is subtle and more pervasive. As water quality degrades – or quantity diminishes – over time, the effect on the stability of a region can be unsettling. For example, for 30 years the Gaza Strip was under Israeli occupation. Water quality deteriorated steadily, saltwater intrusion degraded local wells, and water-related diseases took a rising toll on the people living there. In 1987, the intifada, or Palestinian uprising, broke out in the Gaza Strip, and quickly spread throughout the West Bank. Was water quality the cause? It would be simplistic to claim direct causality. Was it an irritant exacerbating an already tenuous situation? Undoubtedly.

An examination of relations between India and Bangladesh demonstrates that these internal instabilities can be both caused and exacerbated by international water disputes. In the 1960s, India built a barrage at Farakka, diverting a portion of the Ganges flow away from its course into Bangladesh, in an effort to flush silt away from Calcutta’s seaport, some 100 miles to the south. In Bangladesh, the reduced upstream flow resulted in a number of adverse effects: degraded surface and groundwater, impeded navigation, increased salinity, degraded fisheries, and endangered water supplies and public health. Migration from affected areas further compounded the problem. Ironically, many of those displaced in Bangladesh found refuge in India.

Although wars over water have not occurred, there is ample evidence showing that the lack of clean freshwater has occasionally led to intense political instability and that, on a small scale, acute violence may result. Interestingly, we seem to be finding that geographic scale and intensity of conflict are inversely related.

Finally, there is the human security issue of water-related disease. It is estimated that between 5 - 10 million people die each year from water-related diseases or inadequate sanitation. More than half the people in the world lack adequate sanitation. Eighty percent of disease in the developing world is related to water. This is a crisis of epidemic proportions, and the threats to human security are self-evident.

Institutional capacities

Resolving the global water crisis, and ameliorating the attendant political stresses, will require sophisticated mechanisms for cooperation. Current legal and institutional capacities are limited, but strides are being made slowly.

Legal Principles

Generalized legal principles for the management of transboundary waters are currently defined by the Convention on the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses, ratified by the UN General Assembly in 1997. It took 27 years to develop the Convention, highlighting the difficulty of combining legal and hydrologic intricacies. Although it provides many important principles, including responsibility for cooperation and joint management, the Convention is also vague and occasionally contradictory. To date, these principles, and those of the Convention’s precursors – the 1966 Helsinki Rules or subsequent draft articles by international legal bodies – have been explicitly invoked in no more than a handful of water negotiations or treaties. The Convention offers few practical guidelines for water allocations, which are the central issue in most water conflict.

International law concerns itself only with the rights and responsibilities between nations. Some political entities, such as Palestinians along the Jordan River or Kurds along the Euphrates River, who might claim water rights, would not be represented. In addition, cases are heard by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) only with the consent of the parties involved, and there is no practical enforcement mechanism to back up the Court’s findings, except in the most extreme cases. A nation with pressing national interests can disclaim entirely the court’s jurisdiction or findings. Since its creation in 1945, the ICJ has decided only one case regarding international waters.

International Institutions

Just as the flow of water ignores political boundaries, so too does its management strain the capabilities of institutions. Currently, there is no global institution for the management of transboundary water resources. Several UN agencies incorporate water-related issues in their charter, as does the World Bank. Recently, all of these agencies collaboratively produced the Comprehensive Assessment of the Freshwater Resources of the World. Also established was the World Water Council, a self-described “think tank” for world water resources issues. However, none of these institutions incorporates mechanisms for the resolution of transboundary water resources disputes within its mandate.

International Water Treaties

In the absence of detailed water law, adequate institutions, or warfare, the countries that contain or border on the world’s 261 international waterways have managed to muddle through. The FAO has identified more than 3,600 treaties relating to international water resources dating between AD 805 and 1984 (the majority of which deal with some aspect of navigation). Since 1814, nations have negotiated a smaller body of treaties that deal with non-navigational issues of water management, including flood control, hydropower projects, or allocations for consumptive or non-consumptive uses in international basins. Information on 145 of these treaties is summarized in Table 1.

The legal management of transboundary rivers is still in its conceptual infancy. More than half of these 145 treaties have no monitoring provisions and, perhaps as a consequence, two-thirds do not delineate specific allocations and four-fifths have no enforcement mechanism. Moreover, the treaties that do specify quantities allocate a fixed amount to all riparian nations but one, and that one nation must then accept the balance of the river flow, regardless of fluctuations. Finally, multilateral basins are, almost without exception, governed by bilateral treaties, precluding the integrated basin management long-advocated by water managers.

Lessons learned

The most critical security lessons learned from the global experience in water security are as follows:

1. Water crossing international boundaries can cause tensions between nations that share the basin. While the tension is not likely to lead to warfare, early coordination between riparians can help ameliorate the issue.

2. Once international institutions are in place, they are tremendously resilient over time, even between otherwise hostile riparian nations, and even as conflict is waged over other issues.

3. More likely than violent conflict occurring is a gradual decreasing of water quantity or quality, or both, which over time can affect the internal stability of a nation or region, and act as an irritant between ethnic groups, water sectors, or states/provinces. The resulting instability may have effects in the international arena.

4. The greatest threat of the global water crisis to human security comes from the fact that millions of people lack access to sufficient quantities of water at sufficient quality for their well being.

Policy recommendations

International Institutions:

Water dispute amelioration is as important, more effective, and less costly, than conflict resolution. Watershed commissions should be developed for those basins which do not have them, and strengthened for those that do.

Three characteristics of international waters – the fact that conflict is invariably sub-acute, that tensions can be averted when institutions are established early, and that such institutions are tremendously resilient over time – inform this recommendation. Early intervention can be far less costly than conflict resolution processes. In some cases, such as the Nile, the Indus, and the Jordan, as armed conflict seemed imminent, tremendous energy was spent getting the parties to talk to each other. In contrast, discussions in the Mekong Committee, the multilateral working group in the Middle East, and on the Danube, have all moved beyond the causes of immediate disputes on to actual, practical projects which may be implemented in an integrative framework.

Funding and Development Assistance Agencies:

Water-related assistance needs to be coordinated and focused, relating quality, quantity, groundwater, surfacewater, and local socio-political settings in an integrated fashion. Funding should be commensurate with the responsibility assistance agencies have for alleviating the global water crisis.

Improving access to freshwater often rests with agencies that are extraordinarily underfunded. One can contrast the resources spent on issues such as global change and arms control, laudable for their efforts to protect against potential loss of life in the future, to the millions of people now dying because they lack access to clean fresh water. Agencies such as USAID, CIDA, and JICA have the technical expertise and experience to help, yet are hindered by political and budgetary constraints. A powerful argument can be made that water-related disease costs the global economy US$125 billion per year, while alleviating the diseases would cost US$7-50 billion per year (Gleick 1998).

Universities and Research Agencies:

Universities and research agencies can best contribute to alleviation of the water crisis in three major ways:

1) Acquire, analyze, and coordinate the primary data necessary for good empirical work;

2) Identify indicators of future water disputes and/or insecurity in regions most at risk; and

3) Train tomorrow’s water managers in an integrated fashion.

One important issue is that the surplus of primary data currently threatens an information overload in the developed world, while the most basic information is often lacking in the developing world.

Private Industry:

Private industry has historically taken the lead in large development projects. As the emphasis in world water shifts to a smaller scale, and from a focus on supply to one on demand management and improved quality, private industry has much to offer.

Private industry has three traits that can be harnessed to help ameliorate the world water crisis: their reach transcends national boundaries, their resources are generally greater than those of public institutions, and their strategic planning is generally superb. Historically, private companies such as Bechtel and Lyonnaise des Eaux have been involved primarily in large-scale development projects, while the smaller-scale projects have been left to development assistance agencies. Recently, a shift in thinking has taken place in some corporate board rooms. Bank of America, for example, was not involved in the California-wide process of water planning until recently, when its president noticed that practically all of the bank’s investments relied on a safe, stable supply of water. This was true whether the investments were in micro-chip manufacturing, mortgages, or agriculture. When the bank became involved in the “Cal-Fed Plan,” it brought along its lawyers, facilitators and planning expertise, and its financial resources. Subsequently, progress was made in several areas where previously there had been impasse.

Civil Society:

Inherent in our recognition that the most serious problems of water security are those at the local level, is the attendant recognition that civil society is among the best suited to address local issues.

One recurrent pattern in water resources development and management has been a series of projects or approaches in opposition to local values, customs and other cultural processes. Examples of these include large projects such as dams that have displaced hundreds of thousands of people and wiped out sites of cultural and religious heritage, projects promoting water markets among religious groups for whom the idea is sacrilege, or activities as seemingly minor as cutting down a tree sacred to a village djinn. In recent years, as a consequence, those affected by a project have been increasingly involved in the decision-making process, and such efforts must be strongly encouraged.

Conclusions

The global water crisis has led to a large and growing literature warning of future “water wars,” and points to water not only as a cause of historic armed conflict, but as the resource which will likely result in armed conflict in the 21st century. The historical record is quite different – we have not, and in all likelihood will not, go to war over water. In modern times, only seven minor skirmishes were waged over international waters. Conversely, over 3,600 treaties have been signed over different aspects of international waters – 145 in this century on water qua water. May of these treaties have shown tremendous elegance and creativity for dealing with this critical resource. This is not to say there has not been armed conflict over water, only that such disputes generally are between tribes, water-use sectors, or states/provinces. It seems that geographic scale and intensity of conflict are inversely related.

Our work suggests it is important to view international water as a resource whose characteristics tend to induce cooperation, and incite violence only in the exception. However, one should not lose sight of the truly dire straits brought about by the global water crisis. The critical problems that need addressing are neither of wars nor of politics, but rather of getting an adequate supply of clean freshwater to the people of the world.

Endnotes

1 The exception is the earliest documented interstate conflict known, a dispute between the Sumerian city-states of Lagash and Umma over the right to exploit boundary channels along the
Tigris in 2,500 BCE (Cooper, 1983). In other words, the last and only “water war” was 4,500
years ago.

2 For a more complete discussion of this argument refer to A. Wolf, 1999, “Water Wars” and
Water Reality: Conflict and Cooperation along International Waterways.

References

Cooper, J. (1983). Reconstructing History from Ancient Inscriptions: The Lagash-Umma Border Conflict. Malibu, CA: Undena.

Crossette, B. Severe Water Crisis Ahead for Poorest Nations in Next Two Decades. New York Times, 10 August 1995, p. A-13.

Gleick, P. (1998). The World’s Water: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources. Washington, DC: Island
Press.
.
Hamner, J. & Wolf, A. (1998). Patterns in International Water Resource Treaties: The Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database. Colorado Journal of International Environmental Law and Policy. 1997 Yearbook.

Lonergan, S.C. (1997). Global Environmental Change and Human Security. Changes 5. Ottawa: Canadian Global Change Program–The Royal Society of Canada.

United Nations. (1997). Water in the 21st Century: Comprehensive Assessment of the Freshwater Resources of the World. Geneva: World Meteorological Organization and the Stockholm Environment Institute.

Wolf, A. (1999). “Water Wars” and Water Reality: Conflict and cooperation along International Waterways. In S.C. Lonergan (Ed.), Environmental Change, Adaptation and Human Security (forthcoming). Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Web Sites of Interest

The International Water Resources Association: http://www.iwra.siu.edu/

The Pacific Institute: http://www.pacinst.org/

The Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database: http://terra.geo.orst.edu/

The Water Web: http://www.waterweb.org/

Aaron T. Wolf, Ph.D.
Department of Geosciences
Oregon State University

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Figure 1. Global water balance 1997

Figure 2. Global water withdrawals by sector 1900 - 2000

Water and international conflict