Water Wars... a thing of the past, present and future.

I was reading a 16 year old speech by Lester R. Brown from the Stockholm Water Conference in 2000 in which he stated that ‘It is now commonly said that future wars in the Middle East are more likely to be fought over water than over oil.’  Since then The Pacific Institute has compiled a list of conflicts related to water, some of them dating back to 3000BC. It is striking to see how many there have been, ranging from protests leading to violence, to all out military operations. Unerringly it also shows how frequently cutting off water supply to towns, cities and regions has been used as a military offensive tool, most recently in the Syrian civil war.

Water has been called the ‘forgotten cause of conflict in the Middle East.’ Wikileaks revealed cables sent by US ambassador Stephen Seche in 2009 which claimed 14 of Yemen’s 16 aquifers had run dry. He also said ‘70% of unofficial roadblocks stood up by angry citizens are due to water shortages’. In Taiz, the city where major protests played a large part in starting the uprising in Yemen in 2011, piped water flows through the pipes roughly once every 40 days.

Not only has water been used as military tool in the war in Syria, but there is evidence that the severe drought between 2007-2010 in Syria actually was a significant contributory factor to the war (Kelley et al., 2015). Low crop yields caused a displacement of many families to urban areas where there was a strain on resources, fuelling anger and resentment.

The conflicts mentioned so far have been internal ones within a country, caused by a general lack of water as a natural resource, and then poor allocation of it by an either inept or corrupt government.

But of course there are other types of conflict. The main problem with water is deciding who has the right to take what from the water supply. If a river runs through multiple countries, and the first country it runs through withdraws the majority of the water from it, then this will inevitably lead to water shortages in those downstream countries.

This article on the BBC discusses how tensions are rising in central Asia due to a gradual collapse in the system which saw five countries (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan) exchange water and energy, resources in which some countries were rich in whilst others weren’t. The fall of the USSR meant no one was regulating the exchanges between these countries. Therefore Uzbekistan (rich in natural resources which generated electricity) realised they could make more money selling electricity to richer neighbours, meaning less for Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. These countries in response needed to use more water to generate electricity. The result has been chronic water shortages leading to failure to grow crops in the downstream countries, and power shortages in the upstream countries. This has led to serious clashes between citizens of the affected countries.

A recent article in the NY Times raised the point in 2014 that ‘Syria’s government couldn’t respond to a prolonged drought when there was a Syrian Government. So imagine what could happen if Syria is faced by another drought after much of its infrastructure has been ravaged by civil war’. 4.8 million people have fled Syria since the civil war began, whilst another 6.6 million are internally displaced. The country currently is in disrepair with little hope of an end to the conflict coming soon. Kelley noted in his paper that droughts such as those experienced in Syria are now more than twice as likely in the Eastern Mediterranean due to human induced climate change. It does not seem that we will need to imagine much longer.