Posted on 08/30/2006 11:08:18 AM PDT by cogitator
The world's future wars will be fought not over oil but water: an ominous prediction made by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the British ministry of defence and even by some officials of the World Bank.
But experts and academics meeting at an international conference on water management in the Swedish capital are dismissing this prediction as unrealistic, far-fetched and nonsensical.
"Water wars make good newspaper headlines but cooperation (agreements) don't," says Arunabha Ghosh, co-author of the upcoming Human Development Report 2006 themed on water management. The annual report, commissioned by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), is to be released in December.
In reality, Ghosh told the meeting in Stockholm, there are plenty of bilateral, multilateral and trans-boundary agreements for water-sharing -- all or most of which do not make good newspaper copy.
Asked about water wars, Prof. Asit K. Biswas of the Mexico-based Third World Centre for Water Management, told IPS: "This is absolute nonsense because this is not going to happen -- at least not during the next 100 years."
He said the world is not facing a water crisis because of physical water scarcities. "This is baloney," he said.
"What it is facing is a crisis of bad water management," argued Biswas, who was awarded the 2006 international Stockholm Water Prize for "outstanding achievements" in his field. The presentation ceremony took place in Stockholm Thursday.
According to the Paris-based U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), one-third of all river basins are shared by more than two countries.
Globally, there are 262 international river basins: 59 in Africa, 52 in Asia, 73 in Europe, 61 in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 17 in North America. Overall, 145 countries have territories that include at least one shared river basin.
Between 1948 and 1999, UNESCO says, there have been 1,831 "international interactions" recorded, including 507 conflicts, 96 neutral or non-significant events, and most importantly, 1,228 instances of cooperation.
"Despite the potential problem, history has demonstrated that cooperation, rather than conflict, is likely in shared basins," UNESCO concludes.
The Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) says that 10- to 20-year-old arguments about conflict over water are still being recycled.
"Such arguments ignore massive amounts of recent research which shows that water-scarce states that share a water body tend to find cooperative solutions rather than enter into violent conflict," the institute says.
SIWI says that during the entire "intifada" -- the ongoing Palestinian uprising against Israel in the occupied territories of West Bank and Gaza -- the only thing on which the two warring parties continued to cooperate at a basic level was their shared waters.
"Thus, rather than reaching for arguments for the 'water war hypotheses,' the facts seem to support the idea that water is a uniting force and a potential source of peace rather than violent conflict." SIWI said.
Ghosh, co-author of the UNDP study, pointed out several agreements which were "models of cooperation", including the Indus Waters Treaty, the Israel-Jordan accord, the Senegal River Development Organisation and the Mekong River Commission.
A study sponsored by the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars points that despite newspaper headlines screaming "water wars are coming!", these apocalyptic warnings fly in the face of history.
"No nations have gone to war specifically over water resources for thousands of years. International water disputes -- even among fierce enemies -- are resolved peacefully, even as conflicts erupt over other issues," it says.
The study also points out instances of cooperation between riparian nations -- countries or provinces bordering the same river -- that outnumbered conflicts by more than two to one between 1945 and 1999.
Why? "Because water is so important, nations cannot afford to fight over it. Instead, water fuels greater interdependence. By coming together to jointly manage their shared water resources, countries can build trust and prevent conflict," argues the study, jointly co-authored by Aaron Wolf, Annika Kramer, Alexander Carius and Geoffrey Dabelko.
The study also says most of the conflicts have been within nations, and that international rivers are a different story, although a vice president of the World Bank predicted in 1995 that "the wars of the next century will be about water."
In the early 1990s, California farmers bombed pipelines moving water from Owens Valley to Los Angeles, and in 2000 Chinese farmers in Shandong clashed with police to protest government plans to divert irrigation water to cities and industries.
Ghosh cited two recent incidents impacting on water supplies. When Israeli fighter jets recently reduced parts of the Lebanese capital Beirut into rubble, the U.S.-made F-16s also destroyed an important source of life sustenance: water pipelines from the Litani River to farmland along the coastal plain and parts of the Bekaa Valley.
The longstanding conflict in Sri Lanka -- which has been dragging for over 20 years -- was resumed last month over the diversion of a canal by the rebel group, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, fighting for a separate nation state.
"These are two more cases for those who predict water wars," Ghosh said.
Where's all the water going anyway? Once we piss it off or soak the ground with it does it disappear forever?
Hey kudos to you for taking another look at your stance. I wouldn't have done that. I still stand by the idea that eating eggs will kill you, for example.
Anyone who is an honest, non-conflicted "cogitator" has to modify a position when faced with persuasive evidence that contradicts the previously-held position.
Just make sure folks are too thirsty to fight.
Problem solved.
......ever hear of this stuff called rain?
Just had to work in some anti-US stuff somewhere.
Just curious what the whole "U.S.-made" detail has to do with this...other than to indicate a bias to the story.
I've been surprised at the degradation of water supplies in the US, so I'd not be shocked if it were a major conflict-sparking element in the mid future.
Depends on how we've managed it. If we are extracting at a higher rate than the ground can absorb and filter it, then we "mine" the water. In certain geologic conditions, this can change the water quality and aquifer characteristics such that it cannot be restored just by eliminating the deficit (hysteresis. That is, we irreversibly damage the system.
Also, we can dump the water into sinkholes where insufficient filtering occurs, just to get the supply up faster...this rapid cycling means we drink contaminated water. And many contaminants require such low concentrations that any new water added to a system is immediately undrinkable anyway.
But the real question in the article is how neighbors will deal with shared water supplies. Although cooperation has to date exceeded conflict, the assumption that will continue is not justified, IMHO. As was stated in the article, bad management practices are a large part of the problem, and when resources can't be shared readily, conflict arises.
The city of Austin has 6 huge reserviors on the Colorado River, thanks to LBJ and Mr. Sam Rayburn, but most of the water rights belong to the first users of the Colorado River--the rice farmers down along the Texas Coast. Intense, and expensive, negotiations are going on now for the future needs of the Austin metroplex.
Time to invest in desalinization technology.
There is good money to be made in the plight of others.
Let's not leave out the fact that environmentalists refuse to let us build new reservoirs to increase storage capacity in places like California. Propose a new reservoir and some enviro-whacko will discover an endangered species no one has ever seen that can live nowhere else but in the proposed site. So, when it rains in our mountains, most just runs off back into the ocean.
Let me add that if anyone still insists there is a shortage of water, just tell them that you can ship 1 liter of bottled water from Fiji to just about anywhere in the developed world by FedEx overnight for less than $100.
What is the issue: the supply of water or the cost of a sufficient supply? For less than $100/liter, any supply shortage can be eliminated by simply sending sufficient bottles via FedEx.
Of course this is silly, but it demands that the complainer think about what is complaint really is.
see:
http://www.fijiwater.com/
The world's future wars will be fought over the same thing all of the past wars have been fought over - the desire to control the behavior of other people.
Who's going to war over oil?
Im Scottish.
We will be billionaires.
"The world's future wars will be fought over the same thing all of the past wars have been fought over - the desire to control the behavior of other people."
Hmmmmmmmmm........ or control over natural resources.
Isn't that what the war between Iraq and Kuwait was over?
Make all Americans miss the next three meals, and see what happens.
I suppose you'd support getting our drinking-water supply by treating sewage, rather than just using good management practices that allow us to pump a well of clean water, huh? Well, I'd prefer not to take the expensive route--I'd prefer we stop acting like arrogant lefties who ignore reality. The best practice is to properly manage our resources...conserve them. It's far cheaper to get the water before it goes to the oceans.
This reminds me of my niece who became indoctrinated by her 4th grade teacher or whatever level it was, when she became a vegetarian and insisted on not using paper plates while we were on a barrier island. Never mind the fact that I have years of undergraduate and graduate training as well as a decade of experience as an environmental consultant, this girl knew that evil conservatives used paper plates.
She wouldn't listen when I pointed out that the more fresh water we used on the island, the more salt water would intrude into the freshwater aquifer underlying the island--and that the resources used in making the paper plates (and disposing of them off-island) were far better spent than the use of water to run a dishwasher on the island. All she knew was the simplistic model her teacher had taught her.
So for you, and my then 8-year-old niece, let me modify the sign...
The sign in the bathroom begged me to save FRESH water.Sure, we can do things the hard way, but isn't it also a broken business model to pay far more than you must for a commodity?
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