Water Wars

Of all the things that divide human populations, it is not differences in religion, nationality or ethnicity, but rather scarcity of natural resources, none more critical than water, that looms as one of the bedrock reasons for future wars — this according to a number of experts who delve into such dark matters.

The World Commission for Water estimates that in the next two decades human use of water will increase approximately 40 percent, and that 17 percent more water than is available will be needed to grow the world's food.

Yet Quincalee Brown ’61/61, a founder of the Water Environment Research Foundation and former executive director of the Water Environment Federation, disagrees with the bleakest assessments about the role water might play in future wars.

“To date,” she says, “ethnicity and religion have divided human beings far more than any natural resource. It is unique, but our experience so far has been that water has been more of a uniting resource than a dividing one. There have been numerous successful negotiations among parties with disputes over water, even between countries potentially antagonistic to each other.”

And Ruth David ’75, a former CIA deputy director for science and technology who’s now president and CEO of ANSER, a public research institution, concurs with Brown.

But before taking a sigh of relief, read on:

“On the other hand,” Brown adds, “the future is uncertain. As populations increase, as weather patterns continue to change and as the situation becomes more drastic, this willingness to cooperate may change. We can hope for negotiated settlements in all cases, but as yet that future scenario is unknown.”

The Gloomy Arithmetic of Water

What we do know, thanks to scores of scholars and researchers, is that the global water environment is cause for immediate and serious concern.

The rising tides of population, urbanization and industrial and agricultural activity have created an unprecedented demand for fresh water — at a time when tensions among many countries have rarely been greater. And, if certain forecasts hold true, the situation is going to get far bleaker before it gets better.

“We have to realize,” says Brown, who is the 2002 recipient of WSU’s Elliott School of Communication Outstanding Alumnus Award, to be presented on campus Oct. 25, “we’re running out of fresh water. Less than three percent of the world’s water is fresh and available for human use. If all the Earth’s water were shrunk to a one-gallon jug, the available fresh water would be about one tablespoon full.”

Currently an independent water-quality and association-management consultant who serves on the boards of directors of Trojan Technologies Inc. in London, Ontario; the Environment and Energy Study Institute in Washington., D.C.; and the New Zealand Water Environment Research Foundation in Wellington, New Zealand, Brown worked from 1986 until her retirement in 2001 as head of the WEF, an international technical and educational organization dedicated to addressing water-environment issues.

In 1989, she helped found the WERF, which sponsors hundreds of research projects, all with the overriding purpose of promoting improvements in water-quality science and technology.  “All the water we have on Earth is all we’ll ever have,” she says. “If we don’t take care of it, we’re in big trouble.”

That sobering admonition, taken to its logical extreme by a number of other water-focused experts, equates to the very real possibility of wars breaking out over water.

Thomas Fraser Homer-Dixon, the director of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at the University of Toronto, for instance, is one who concludes that environmental scarcities of such resources as fish, forests, cropland and water will be — in the not-so-distant future — the root causes of civil violence and war.

The problem is not that our watery world is drying out, of course, but there are, Brown says, ominous signs our world’s water is in peril. “The problem is we’re polluting water faster because of increased population, increased industrialization to provide goods for this population and increased agriculture to feed this population,” she explains. “The unequal distribution of water is also an enormous problem.

The Middle East and Africa have about one percent of the world’s fresh water for five percent of the world’s population. We in Canada and the United States are about the reverse of that. Another problem in the developed world is that we overuse the water supplies we have.

In the United States, we use 400 billion gallons a day, but our rainfall averages about 42 billion gallons per day. We are using water faster than it is being replenished in 35 states. Our Ogallala Aquifer — which is huge, about 174,000 square miles, from South Dakota to Texas — is being depleted at a rate 25 percent faster than it is being recharged.”

A shotgun sampling of other statistics from studies by the CIA, the United Nations and the World Bank, for example, underscores Brown’s comments:

About one-third of the world’s population lives in nations with at least moderate water stress, that is, where water usage is more than 10 percent of the renewable fresh-water supply; 20 percent of the population lacks access to safe drinking water, with 50 percent lacking adequate sanitation; 10 percent of the world’s food is grown with water pumped from overused aquifers; and 80 percent of the developing world’s water usage goes into agriculture, a proportion that’s not sustainable.

That’s the view today. Tomorrow, according to literally bookloads of dire forecasts, it gets worse.

To cite only a few of the most troubling: Over the next half century, the Earth’s population is expected to surge to anywhere from 9 billion to 20 billion people, and, as the National Academy of Sciences warns, 95 percent of the increase will be in the poorest regions of the world — the regions least able to cope with environmental scarcity.

Noting “the gloomy arithmetic of water,” researchers of a report done for the World Commission for Water estimate that in the next two decades human use of water will increase by about 40 percent, and that 17 percent more water than is available will be needed to grow the world’s food.

According to CIA reports, by 2015 nearly half the world’s population will be experiencing water stress (defined here as less than 1,700 cubic meters available per person per day), mostly in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and northern China.

And, as researcher and journalist Robert D. Kaplan sees it: “In the 21st century, water will be in dangerously short supply in such diverse locales as Saudi Arabia, Central Asia and the southwestern United States.”

‘The Coming Anarchy’

“Certainly,” Brown says, “we can expect deteriorating conditions as the population increases. By 2050, the world’s people will have insufficient water.” Compounding this crisis of scarcity is the fact that many water-stressed areas depend on water shared by two or more nations, which increases the risk of political friction.

The good news is, although water is a proven source of contention, no water dispute has yet caused open violence among nations or states, even in areas with hair-trigger water issues.

Instead, as Brown reports, water shortages have led to cooperative arrangements, for instance, in countries along the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, where dams and irrigation projects in Turkey affect water flow into Syria and Iraq; along the Ganges, where India and Bangladesh have in place a 30-year treaty to share water; and along the Nile, where Egypt’s downriver usage affects how much upriver water Ethiopia and Sudan pull for irrigation.

So far, so good. But as populations press against the ever-more-severe limits of available water, darker impulses may prevail. “Conflict is more likely to erupt in areas where issues of water shortage are compounded by other sources of tension,” comments Ruth David, who is providing her opinions from the vantage of a private U.S. citizen.

As a member of, among others, the National Security Agency Advisory Board, the National Research Council Naval Studies Board and the newly-created Homeland Security Advisory Council, to which she was appointed earlier this summer, she is an exceptionally well-informed citizen.

Indeed, adding religious, racial and cultural clashes into the water-wars equation makes conflict seem imminent. Kaplan, for example, issued warnings about the causative link between environmental scarcity and war back in 1994 in his article “The Coming Anarchy,” and U.S. intelligence services have identified a number of areas where water-driven violence might flare at any time. They include India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and several places in the Middle East and Africa.

Note that many of those locales also happen to be terrorist hotspots, a fact that brings to mind a sinister prospect: water terrorism. David counsels that it’s important to keep the issues of water wars and water terrorism distinct.

“They are virtually uncorrelated,” she stresses. “Conflicts stemming from water shortages are more likely to erupt between adjacent nation-states, while an attack on our nation’s water supply is more likely to stem from a terrorist group which may or may not be affiliated with a nation-state.”

Water terrorism was top of mind this June when George W. Bush paid a visit to a water treatment facility in Kansas City, thus demonstrating that the United States takes seriously potential threats to the nation’s water supply.

So how real is the threat of water terrorism? David responds, “Although our nation’s water supplies in general have little physical protection, an attack that would cause massive casualties is, in my mind, unlikely.

This is largely due to the dilution factor which drives the volume of contaminant that would be required to cause death. That said, this is not a threat that should be ignored. It is important we assess the vulnerability of our major supplies and implement risk mitigation and consequence management strategies.”  

An Equation for Optimism

Although grim consequences lurk behind today’s management of our blue planet’s surging scarcity of water, there are bright spots amidst the gloom. “While there is no global consensus yet on such basic things as how we should measure and define, for example, water stress,” Brown reports, “the world is getting together to focus on the problem. The third international congress on water issues will meet in Japan next year. And certainly technology is a reason for optimism.

Wastewater treatment plants can keep water clean, and we have sophisticated means of cleaning polluted groundwater and aquifers. We’ve also made progress in desalination technology. But these are expensive measures and so of limited help to developing countries. As a result, we’re trying to increasingly look for simple solutions of appropriate technology to solve water problems in the least developed of countries.”

Plus, individuals everywhere still wield the power to make a difference: “We all should practice sane water conservation,” she counsels. “Something as simple as not running the water while brushing your teeth adds up to important savings.

On a larger scale, nations must address issues of population, and we must work together to protect our fresh water so it can continue to supply future generations with the fresh, clean water they’ll need.”

Otherwise, the color of war in our darkly glimmering future may well prove to be aqua blue.