The writer of this article is Brahma Chellaney who is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research and the author of the forthcoming book 'Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis (Oxford University Press)'.
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In an increasingly water-stressed world, shared water resources
are becoming an instrument of power, fostering competition within
and between nations. The struggle for water is escalating
political tensions and exacerbating impacts on ecosystems.
This week’s Budapest World Water Summit is the latest initiative in
the search for ways to mitigate the pressing challenges.
Consider some sobering facts:
- Bottled water
at the grocery store is already more expensive than crude oil on the
international spot market.
- More people in
the world today own or use a mobile phone than have access to water
sanitation services.
- Unclean water
is the greatest killer on the globe, yet a fifth of humankind still lacks
easy access to potable water.
- More than half
of the global population currently lives under water stress—a figure
projected to increase to two-thirds during the next decade.
Adequate access to natural resources, historically, has been a key
factor in peace and war.
- Water, however, is very
different from other natural resources.
- There are substitutes for a
number of resources, including oil, but none for water.
- Countries can import, even
from distant lands, fossil fuels, mineral ores, and resources originating
in the biosphere.
- But they cannot import the
most vital of all resources, water—certainly not in a major or sustainable
manner. Water is essentially local and thus very expensive to ship across
seas.
Rapid economic and demographic expansion, however, has already
turned potable water into a major issue across large parts of the world.
Lifestyle changes, for example, have spurred increasing per capita water
consumption in the form of industrial and agricultural products.
- Consumption growth has become the single biggest driver of water stress. Rising incomes, for example, have promoted changing diets, especially a greater intake of meat, whose production is notoriously water-intensive.
- It is about 10 times more water-intensive to produce meat than plant-based calories and proteins.
US intelligence has warned that such water conflicts could turn
into real wars. According to a report reflecting the joint judgement of US
intelligence agencies, the use of water as a weapon of war or a tool of
terrorism will be more likely in the next decade in some regions.
Commercial or state decisions in many countries on where to set up
new manufacturing or energy plants are increasingly being constrained by
inadequate local water availability.
The World Bank has estimated the economic cost of China’s water
problems at 2.3% of its gross domestic product. China,
however, is not as yet under water stress—a term internationally defined as the
availability of less than 1,700 cubic metres of water per head per year. The
already water-stressed economies, stretching from South Korea and India to
Egypt and Morocco, are paying a higher price for their water problems.
- In fact, water is becoming
the world’s next major security and economic challenge.
- Although no modern war has
been fought just over water, this resource has been an underlying factor
in several armed conflicts.
- With the era of cheap,
bountiful water having been replaced by increasing supply and quality
constraints, the risks of overt water wars are now increasing.
Averting water wars needs rules-based
cooperation, water sharing and dispute settlement mechanisms. However, there is
still no international water law in force, and most of the regional water
agreements are toothless, lack monitoring and enforcement rules and provisions
to formally divide water among users.
Worse still, unilateralist appropriation
of shared resources is endemic where autocrats rule.
- For example, China rejects
the very concept of water sharing and is working to have its hand on
Asia’s water tap by building an extensive upstream
hydro-infrastructure.
- India, by contrast, has a
water-sharing treaty with each of the two countries located downstream to
it—Pakistan and Bangladesh.
- Indeed, the only Asian
treaties that incorporate a specific sharing formula on cross-border river
flows are those covering the Indus and the Ganges.
- Both these treaties set new
principles in international water law: the 1996 Ganges pact guarantees
Bangladesh an equal share of the downstream flows in the most difficult
dry season, while the earlier 1960 Indus treaty remains the world’s most
generous water-sharing arrangement, under which India agreed to set aside
80.52% of the waters of the six-river Indus system for Pakistan
indefinitely in the naïve belief that it could trade water for peace.
A central issue facing Asia is not the readiness to accommodate
China’s rise but the need to persuade China’s leaders to institutionalize
cooperation with its neighbours on shared resources. China already boasts more
dams than any other country in the world. And its rush to build yet more dams,
especially giant ones, promises to roil relations across Asia. If China
continues on its current course, prospects for a rules-based Asian order could
perish forever.
Moral of the Story
!!
Water poses a more intractable problem for the world than peak
oil, economic slowdown and other oft-cited challenges. Addressing this core
problem indeed holds the key to dealing with other challenges because of
water’s nexus with global warming, energy shortages, stresses on food supply,
population pressures, pollution, environmental degradation, global epidemics
and natural disasters.
