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| Credit: flickr |
“We've known for years that our water supply would become a point of contention in the next few decades and we've done very little to mitigate the problem,” said former world bank vice president, Dr. IsmailSerageldin in 1995.
All of the water on the planet today was here before humans even existed. To put a number on it, that's roughly one sextillion, 260 quintillion liters of water on Earth. 97% of that is saltwater, and the majority of the remaining freshwater is frozen in ice caps and glaciers. So what's actually accessible is just a fraction of a fraction. Only 3 percent of the water is fresh and that will be the new triggering point. In this article, we're going to discuss the consequences of our shrinking water supply and what we should expect in the coming decades.
Without water, man can live only a few days. It can take 3,500 liters of water to grow the food each person needs per day. That's more than a liter per calorie. It takes 15,400 liters of water on average for every kilogram of beef he eats. It’s equal to 50 bathtubs filled with water. So for everything pertinent to the survival of civilization, water is indispensable.
The climate crisis exacerbates the reliability of the water supply with erratic rainfall and hotter days. When droughts do hit, they can be devastating. In Cape Town, the dam's water was almost depleted in 2018 and hardly averted a crisis. The United Nations anticipates that 2/3 of the world's population will live in water-scarce regions by 2025.
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The UN pinpoints five hot spots for future water wars-- The Nile, Ganges-Brahmaputra, Indus, Tigris-Euphrates, and the Colorado Rivers. But disputes over water aren't something new. There have been at least 655 instances of conflict over water throughout history. However, less than 30 of them roiled in armed aggression. Scarcity is actually less likely to cause conflict than other factors, such as the threat of a water source being tampered with by, say, pollution or an upstream dam. Egypt, for instance, has ongoing disputes with many of the nine nations upstream along the Nile, which regularly runs dry before it reaches the ocean. Ethiopia, one of these countries, is now constructing a dam, which Egypt sees as a threat to its precious water supply. This is the latest incarnation of a dispute along the Nile that goes back centuries. Historically, water disputes have been one of many triggers in broader political tensions.
Brahmaputra: India, China, and Bangladesh:
Wildly known as the water tower of Asia, the Tibetan Plateau is a rich repository of freshwater that is shared across Asia it is the source of water for a dozen Trans Boundary Rivers including the Yangtze, Yellow, Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, the Salween, and Makan Rivers. Collectively more than 3 billion people depend on these rivers. Just take a moment to appreciate this geopolitical fact of existence the slightest alteration in water flow could eat a chain of environmental refugees. Beijing plans to construct a dozen hydropower plants on the river and several more on its tributaries. as these dams become operational the altered water flow will damage agriculture ecology and upset the lives of 1.3 billion people in downstream India and Bangladesh. The Brahmaputra, for example, is a major international river shared by China, India, and Bangladesh. Its total length is 2900 km, starting from its source on the Tibetan Plateau, near Chang Jing Dongha Laser Mount Kailash. There is a clash over the construction of projects along the Brahmaputra. India expressed concern over the flow of water in 2013 when China resorted to starting three new projects on the Brahmaputra River. The chances of conflict will increase and will lead to conflict if the situation continues to get worse.
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| Credit: Asia Times |
The Indus: Pakistan and India:
Let's look at Kashmir. Pakistan and India both claim ownership of the region and the water that runs through it. A 1960 treaty that divvies up the coveted tributaries of the Indus River has actually held up well through the years. Still, tensions over dams built upstream or diverted water flow have added to the turmoil between the two nuclear-armed nations. A 2018 IMF report ranked Pakistan third among countries facing acute water shortages. As the Himalayan glaciers that feed the Indus melt due to climate change, tensions will only rise. The two hostile nations that fought several times could again embroil into a new war with more severity.
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| Credit: Hans India |
Colorado River:
Finally, let's look at another potential conflict area pinpointed by the United Nations. The Colorado River supplies water to many large cities in the southwest United States, including Los Angeles- serving almost 40 million people and irrigating nearly 5.5 million acres of land. As more people and places rely on this dwindling river resource, tensions may arise and result in friction. A large portion of the US will run out of their reliable water supply in a matter of years. States like Arizona are having to start prepping for their own day zero countdowns and tension between states and between urban areas and agricultural areas is becoming more severe. Each state wants to ensure they get their allotted water and that's becoming more and more difficult. Fighting between municipal water providers and farmers is constant. The urban areas saying they use water more efficiently and provide water to a far greater number of people while agricultural areas claim their farmland as their birthright and assert that they're providing a valuable service to the country by producing their crops. This has the potential to invoke a water war between states.
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| Credit:Outdoor project |
Water and Civil wars:
Water scarcity also provokes civil wars. The civil war in Syria began for a wide variety of reasons, but some analysts argue one key factor was water. A drought from 2006 to 2011 caused 75% of farms to fail and 85% of Syria's livestock to die- As a result, 1.5 million people, moved into cities to find work. The deteriorating economy combined with the birth of the Islamic State group, the spread of protests from the Arab Spring, and other complex factors set the stage for the social unrest that roiled into a civil war in 2011- a war that has led to the death of over half a million people and displaced 12 million people, over half of the population. This is how the water wars of the future will likely look.
Read: Climate change and the question of War
The US oil and water story:
The US is the most powerful country in the world by far that fact has completely gone to our heads and because of this American leadership feels it has the right to invade other nations for literally any reason or no reason at all when we figured it out. The US would need more oil to maintain its dominance. Consider; the US invaded countries with large amounts of oil the same will happen with water. America may occupy countries where water conflict is starting to pop up claiming she is there to maintain order and stability and all the while she’ll make the problem worse to feed its industrial war machine and quietly siphon off all the water it needs.
Migration:
The report also highlighted that the intense water scarcity could displace 700 million people globally in the years following. The chance of cross-border conflicts over water could rise by 95% in the next century. The World Bank estimates that up to four million people from Mexico and Central America could be displaced by climate change in the next 30 years. Worldwide, 16 million people were displaced by weather-related disasters in 2018. A quarter of the global population is running out of water. But there are some real, actionable measures that can help turn the tide. The migration will become the flashpoint of conflict among nations. The ethnic will be stirred up incredibly. In this case, authoritarian regimes are highly likely to start conflicts across the borders to minimize public anger.
What cities can do to promote sustainable water usage in the future is to invest in water infrastructure, recycle wastewater, swap out some hydration-intensive crops, and greatly reduce livestock. Until these solutions and others like them are enacted on a global scale, our limited supply of fresh water will continue to be a flashpoint for conflict. How we choose to deal with that will define the water wars of the future.
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