SAIS Review of International Affairs

Global Water Supply and Demand

All humans need clean, fresh water. Modern society depends on adequate water supplies for agriculture and industry, for fisheries and forestry, to generate power, and to eliminate waste. Globally, there is more than enough water to fulfill these demands. The planet’s estimated fresh water stocks top thirty-five million cubic kilometers (km³), enough to fill every lake, river, and wetland on Earth more than three hundred thousand times over. Most of this massive fresh water reserve, though, lies frozen in the polar ice caps or buried in deep underground aquifers, effectively unavailable for human use. In fact, accessible global renewable fresh water resources total 29,700 km³ annually, less than one-tenth of a percent of the earth’s total store of fresh water.²

Worldwide, humans directly withdraw about 3,700 km³ of water per year from various sources for all purposes. Society appropriates considerably more water indirectly—11,300 km³ annually by one estimate—in the form of rainfall and soil moisture for farming, forage for grazing animals, and other uses. Another significant portion of humanity’s fresh water claim concerns flows not withdrawn from rivers and lakes but used in-stream to dilute human, agricultural, and industrial wastes. All told, when measured against obtainable supplies of water, humans already appropriate more than half of the planet’s renewable and accessible fresh water.³

The hydrological cycle is global and unending, but water supplies are not unlimited. Rainfall, snow and ice melt, seepage between surface waters and groundwater, and return flows from irrigation and other uses ultimately replenish rivers and lakes and recharge aquifers to varying degrees. For any given source, however, renewals vary over time and place. River flows and lake levels wax and wane through wet and dry seasons. Natural processes may only restore [End Page 146] underground aquifers over tens, hundreds, or even thousands of years. Every watershed is only replenished by a finite amount of renewable water every year.

As society’s demands have grown, water withdrawals have increasingly strained the available resources in many parts of the world. In 2000, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), some 1.6 billion people worldwide resided in river basins experiencing severe water stress. By 2050 the number is expected to surge to 3.9 billion, some 40 percent of the global population, including nearly all of Central and South Asia, the Middle East, and much of China and North Africa.⁴ Many river systems are already reaching the limits of their renewable capacity. In several major basins—including the Amu Darya, Colorado, Ganges, Indus, Jordan, Nile, and Tigris-Euphrates—total water withdrawals nearly equal or even surpass long-term flow balances and ecosystem needs. Some 1.4 billion people today reside in basins that are essentially considered “closed,” meaning that all of their annually available renewable waters are already being used to meet various human demands or to fulfill environmental requirements for maintaining vital ecosystems. With little to no spare capacity left, these basins have scant margin for maneuver; rising demands can only be accommodated by reductions and trade-offs among current users.⁵

Often overlooked in water resource analyses, billions of users in developed and developing nations alike rely on groundwater reserves held in underground aquifers to supplement or substitute for surface sources. Groundwater extraction has ballooned in recent decades, coming to represent about one-quarter of global withdrawals and half of the world’s potable water supply. Groundwater development has also proven crucial to lifting farm yields in the developing world, especially in Asia. In the 1960s, many developing countries struggled to produce enough food for their rapidly rising populations. Timely innovations with new seed varieties, fertilizers, pesticides, and increased irrigation allowed them to dramatically boost their agricultural output. Indeed, some experts have labeled this Green Revolution a “tubewell revolution” due to the impact of expanded irrigation enabled by groundwater wells.⁶

Yet groundwater supplies increasingly face the same pressures as surface supplies. Groundwater abstractions exceed sustainable thresholds in many countries. In the Indus, for example, satellite data show the basin aquifers losing ten km³ of water every year, an annual debit equivalent to more than half of the combined capacity of India’s six large dams in the region, or almost half the water storage in all of the reservoirs in Pakistan combined.⁷ In the Tigris-Euphrates—shared by Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey—yearly groundwater depletion amounts to some thirteen km³, progressively exhausting the basin’s reserves.⁸ All told, it is likely that unreplenished overdrafts from aquifers around the world considerably exceed 160 km³ a year, double the annual flow of the Nile.⁹

Humans significantly alter fresh water systems not only by the resources they withdraw, but because of the contaminants they add. Industry, farming, mining, and other activities pollute water supplies with synthetic chemicals, toxic metals, pesticides, and fertilizers. Agricultural and human waste disposal taint both surface and groundwater sources with microbial pathogens that can compromise human health, as well as with nitrogen, phosphorous, and other [End Page 147] nutrients that choke waterways with algal blooms and toxic bacteria. One recent study of more than one thousand basins worldwide found that nitrogen pollution already exceeds natural absorption capacity in two-thirds of rivers, while phosphorous pollution surpasses natural assimilation in one-third of waterways.¹⁰

Often, water quantity and water quality stresses occur together, as demand centers requiring large withdrawals—urban agglomerations, industrial concentrations, zones of intensive agriculture, and the like—also generate substantial pollution. And pressures on water quantity and quality interact. As consumers draw off water for various purposes, diminishing water quantities boosts the concentration of any pollutants present, eroding water quality. Likewise, decreasing water quality lowers available water quantities, as some sources become too degraded for certain uses. Considering these water challenges together, one assessment of global rivers by a team of American and European analysts combining data for twenty-three different stressors such as water losses, pollutant loads, flow disruption from dams and other diversions, etc., found that 4.8 billion people (nearly 80 percent of the world population) inhabit areas with high aggregate levels of threats to water security.¹¹

Where countries or communities lack secure access to sufficient supplies of clean, fresh water, the consequences can be severe. According to the World Bank, inadequate water and sanitation supplies cost a country like Indonesia 2 percent of GDP per year in health damages, productivity losses, and lost work and school days. In Iran, the annual losses approach 3 percent of GDP. In India, they top 6 percent of GDP.¹² More troubling than the economic impacts is the human toll. Studies by the World Health Organization (WHO) conclude that almost 10 percent of the annual global disease burden and more than 6 percent of all deaths worldwide—including more than two million preventable deaths of children under five years old—can be traced to unsafe or inadequate water supplies.¹³

Growing Water Risks

Over the course of the twentieth century, global water withdrawals rose appreciably faster than the population. While world population quadrupled from 1.6 billion people in 1900 to 6.1 billion in 2000, world water use swelled sevenfold. In the coming decades, the planet will add 3.4 billion more inhabitants, growing another 56 percent to 9.6 billion people in 2050.¹⁴ Increasingly, these people will live in cities. The UN projects that the world’s urban population will surge from 3.9 billion people today to 6.4 billion in 2050, at which point two-thirds of humanity will reside in cities. Nearly all of this growth—almost 90 percent—will be concentrated in Africa and Asia.¹⁵ Providing water to these populations will, for many countries, pose herculean challenges. Just in India, delivering piped water to all urban households would require installing 200 million new connections by 2020 alone.¹⁶

Global water demand will, to a large degree, climb in tandem with population and economic growth. The OECD anticipates that world water use will [End Page 148] jump 55 percent by mid-century, primarily driven by a 400 percent surge in demand from manufacturing, a 140 percent rise in withdrawals for electricity production, and a 130 percent increase in domestic use.¹⁷ More important to future demand than the water needed to drink, wash, and cook, is the water that growing populations will need in order to eat. Agriculture accounts for 70 percent of water withdrawals worldwide, rising to 90 percent or more in many developing nations. International norms established by the WHO and UN Children’s Fund, or UNICEF, hold that each person requires a minimum of twenty liters of water per day for drinking and basic hygiene. By contrast, it takes two thousand to five thousand liters per person per day to grow the food to support diets of twenty-eight hundred kilocalories daily, the benchmark used by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization as the threshold for food security.¹⁸ Rising global population, then, will drive up agricultural water use. So will improving standards of living. With higher incomes, dietary preferences and possibilities shift, increasing demand for more water-intensive foods such as dairy, eggs, and meat.

According to a comprehensive global assessment led by experts at the International Water Management Institute, absent pronounced improvements in water productivity, agricultural water consumption could grow 70 to 90 percent by 2050, requiring an additional five thousand km³ of water. Scenario analyses indicate several strategies could be deployed to meet this demand, but each entails its own risks. Rain-fed agriculture can be upgraded, but even under optimistic productivity assumptions, global water consumption would need to increase by 30 percent. Expanding irrigated areas also raises output, but this scenario requires increasing water diversions by 55 percent and, by 2050, more than doubles—to 2.6 billion—the number of people living in basins exhibiting physical water scarcity (where more than 75 percent of flows are devoted to human use). Enhancing irrigation performance improves crop yields, but still necessitates increasing global withdrawals by nearly one-third, suggesting sizable impacts on river flows and groundwater recharge.¹⁹

Global climate change threatens to exacerbate these pressures on water resources. Continuing global warming will accelerate the earth’s hydrologic cycle, increasing both precipitation and evaporation and impinging on fundamental hydro-meteorological mechanisms. Elemental patterns and processes, such as the timing and amount of rainfall and snowfall; the onset of the monsoon; and the recurrence of El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomena may shift or falter from expectations. Such impacts could scramble the seasonal availability or shuffle the geographical distribution of crucial water supplies. Long-term shifts in the volume, timing, location, and form of precipitation (whether as rain or as snow) could upset the fresh water flows available to communities and ecosystems around the planet. Indeed, water managers expect that by the middle of the twenty-first century, climate change will alter river discharge in every populated basin on the planet.²⁰ Model projections evaluated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggest that for each degree Celsius of global warming, another 7 percent of the global population will suffer a drop in renewable water resources of 20 percent or more.²¹ Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have determined that, by 2050, the [End Page 149] combined effects of socio-economic pressures and continuing climate change could plunge an additional one billion to 1.3 billion people into conditions where water needs will consistently exceed the available surface water supplies.²²

Conflict Basins: Will Resource Competition Spur Water Wars?

To many observers, such figures portend potentially wrenching collisions between growing water requirements and available water resources. Inadequate water supplies can impair agricultural production, endanger public health, upset established settlement patterns, and jeopardize livelihoods and social well-being. Where different countries or different communities rely on the same water sources, impending shortfalls between rising demands and diminishing availability could sharpen competition or even engender violent conflict to secure scarce resources. Policymakers, pundits, and the popular press now frequently evoke the specter of “water wars.”²³

No modern state has ever declared war on another solely over water. On the contrary, countries reliant on the same water supplies seem to find motive for a collaborative modus vivendi more often than a casus belli in their shared resources. Many otherwise antagonistic nations have succeeded in coordinating water management to varying degrees. Indeed, some hostile neighbors have continued to cooperate over water even as their armies clashed. Academic studies have shown that violent international conflict over water is almost nonexistent in the contemporary era. Aaron Wolf and his colleagues at Oregon State University have assembled a database of more than 2,500 state-to-state interactions over water supplies around the world between 1948 and 2008. They found that cooperative interactions (such as the exchange of scientific or technical information or assistance) outweighed conflictive events two-to-one. No interaction resulted in formal warfare and only forty-five entailed any degree of hostile violence or military acts, while states signed more than 150 cooperative water treaties during the same period.²⁴

Nevertheless, open warfare between nation states struggling to ensure their share is not the only potential threat to peace and prosperity posed by rising stresses on common waters. Water conflicts may take other forms and pathways. Veiled coercion by an upstream power or a downstream neighbor could prove as destabilizing as overt violence. Water disputes may ramify into confrontations over arable land, productive fisheries, or other goods that water sustains. And frictions over fresh water could also fuel tensions within countries as well as between them, spurring domestic unrest or embroiling surrounding regions.

Many of the world’s most worrying potential water conflicts involve clashes not over shifting physical availability of water—fights over a fixed or shrinking supply—but fights over control of one group’s access to water by another. Thus, in the Tigris-Euphrates Basin, upstream Turkey has long pursued a program of dam construction for irrigation and hydropower. But Turkey’s projects to ensure water, food, and energy security for its population are perceived by its downstream neighbors, Iraq and Syria, as enduring [End Page 150] sources of insecurity, giving Ankara potential leverage over its neighbors’ vital water supplies. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Syria wielded support for the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and its insurgent activities as a counterweight against Turkey’s latent ability to manipulate water flows in the Euphrates. In 1987, the conflict entered the realm of formal diplomacy as the two countries signed dual protocols by which Turkey expressly guaranteed Syria an annual average minimum flow on the Euphrates while Damascus pledged to curtail its support for the PKK. Nevertheless, Turkey frequently failed to comply and Syria soon renewed its backing of the Kurdish group, precipitating serial political crises and military showdowns. In 1998, Syria’s ongoing assistance to the PKK animated Ankara to accuse the Assad regime of waging an “undeclared war” in Turkey’s southeast. Under threat of armed intervention, Damascus then ceased its support for the separatist movement, expelling rebel leader Abdullah Öcalan and concluding the 1998 Adana security agreement, which banned the PKK as a terrorist organization.²⁵ Looking beyond the horizon of such a single case, an extensive statistical study of nearly every shared river in the world, covering 261 international basins from 1816 to 2007, found that countries sharing a river in similar asymmetric upstream-downstream power relations experienced notably higher levels of international conflict.²⁶

Similar dynamics may contribute to frictions within states as well as between them. Food security is closely linked to water availability, as regions with very distinct seasonal harvests are often dependent upon water for agricultural harvests and livestock populations. Threatened water and food supplies, and the subsequent economic impacts, can put additional pressure on already strained political structures.²⁷ Resulting tensions, therefore, often manifest in domestic civil unrest. In the Niger River Basin of West Africa, for example, shifting rainfall patterns over the past decades have pushed migratory herders ever further south in search of grazing grounds. There they have clashed with sedentary farmers over access to watering points and arable land. In the early months of 2014, more than one thousand people were killed in such encounters in central Nigeria alone.²⁸

Finally, in addition to possibly contributing to social or political conflict, water can become a tool of conflict, as recently demonstrated by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the Tigris-Euphrates Basin. In the summer of 2014, ISIS and US-backed Iraqi forces battled for control of the Mosul Dam in northern Iraq. Should ISIS have permanently seized the dam, its ability to cut off distribution of water or electricity would have been a powerful strategic weapon in the group’s greater fight for territorial control. The Mosul Dam, which holds eleven to twelve km³ of water, represents the essential water supply for Mosul’s long dry season. The dam also generates up to one thousand megawatts of electricity for neighboring communities, roughly enough to power over half a million homes. Terrifyingly, if ISIS had envisaged destroying the dam to menace the city, the resulting wave would have swept downstream [End Page 151] up to twenty meters high. US officials estimated such a catastrophe could have resulted in up to five hundred thousand deaths.²⁹

Formal Governance Efforts

Where there is potential for conflict, there often lies potential for cooperation. Water resource management, although involving a host of political and social variables, is inherently amenable to environmental, engineering, and policy intervention and improvement. Although there are no simple panaceas, water supplies and demand can be researched, modeled, monitored, and managed for risk and uncertainty. Policy choices and outcomes can be collectively debated, evaluated, and updated.³⁰ Parties unable to agree on a host of other political matters often come to the table over water.

In fact, it is often in this space that formal relationships between nations can be improved. Transboundary water management is a holistic regional effort involving cooperative engagement of multiple countries. Effective and practical water management requires relationship building and negotiation. And while not all negotiation is balanced, there are numerous examples in which formal governance efforts staved off potential disaster.

One of the most prominent and challenging examples in formal management has been the Indus Basin in South Asia. The Indus River runs from its headwaters in the Tibetan Plateau of China through northern India and across Pakistan before entering the Arabian Sea near the city of Karachi. The international boundary that divided India and Pakistan at independence also cut through the basin, setting the two states at odds over water. The total basin occupies a land area of 1.12 million square kilometers (km²), 47 percent of which lies in Pakistan and 39 percent of which lies in India. At the same time, the basin makes up only 14 percent of India, but a whopping 65 percent of Pakistan. As the downstream neighbor, Pakistan feared Indian withdrawals or diversions could deprive it of its water supply, throttling its agriculture and undermining its food security. Up-river, India worried that according all of the Indus’s flow to Pakistan would curtail possibilities for developing the river for its own benefit.

Recognizing the potential for conflict, the two countries—with the help of the World Bank—negotiated the 1960 Indus Water Treaty (IWT). Unlike other water agreements that typically distribute water allowances between riparians—either as absolute amounts or percentages of the river flow—the Indus treaty physically divided the river, allocating use of the three western tributaries that contribute to the main river entirely to Pakistan and the three eastern tributaries to India. The treaty also controls the type and features of projects that India can establish on its portion of the Indus. The IWT has its flaws: the accord has no provisions for how the parties should respond to the variations in water flow that climate change could engender. It barely addresses water quality or pollution. And while the two countries share transboundary aquifers as well as surface waters, there is no agreement for sharing supply or even sharing data on groundwater resources. Yet, all in all, the treaty has fared well over the [End Page 152] decades, surviving three wars and countless lesser clashes and remains the only such diplomatic agreement of its kind between the two countries.³¹

The Nile River Basin offers another good example in which formal cooperation has encouraged states, albeit begrudgingly, to avoid conflict. The Nile River Basin is composed of eleven countries, 160 million people, and a drainage area that includes over 10 percent of Africa’s landmass. The Nile River has an annual flow of nearly eighty-four km³ and provides an important lifeline for agriculture and other sectors of each basin country.³² Yet certain riparian states are more dependent on the river than others. For nearly half of its journey, the Nile runs through countries that have no effective rainfall, making the river nearly their only water source. As a result, Egypt relies on upstream flows arriving from beyond its borders for 97 percent of its water needs, while Sudan relies on the Nile for 75 percent of its water needs. Ethiopia, in contrast, is self-sufficient in water supplies, and its ample rainfall lies at the source of more than four-fifths of the Nile’s downstream flows.³³

Water management agreements on the Nile originated in British colonial rule and sought to protect Egypt and Sudan’s “historic rights” to the river. This approach was codified in the 1959 Nile Water Agreement, essentially allocating all of the Nile’s annual flow to these two countries, leaving no amount legally set aside for other nations. In response to increasing complaints of inequity by upstream Nile states, and given the severity of droughts in the 1980s, the World Bank in 1999 funded the creation of the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI), a transitional agreement signed by all the riparian states intended to build cooperative management capabilities. The NBI has successfully focused on promoting economic development in the Nile Basin, often through water infrastructure development projects, such as irrigation networks, and has moved forward multilateral “benefit-sharing.” However, its outcomes have been mixed. A new Nile Basin Cooperative Framework Agreement, proposed by upstream riparian nations in 2010, was firmly rejected by both Egypt and Sudan.³⁴ Yet as other basin countries develop, and as the uncertain political situations in Egypt and Sudan continue, the upstream countries have moved forward with their own water development plans. Ethiopia recently began construction of the six thousand megawatt Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile, which would be the largest dam in Africa and could effectively control much of the water dynamics downstream.³⁵ Despite aggressive rhetoric and ongoing objections, several rounds of trilateral talks between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan occurred in 2014, resulting in early 2015 in the signing of a “Declaration of Principles” pledging the countries to fair and appropriate use of their common water resources and lending cautious optimism to hopes that negotiation rather than conflict will win out.³⁶

Informal Governance: An Alternate Path Forward

The promise of formal water governance structures sometimes belies political reality. The Indus and Nile agreements, for example, have yet to fully resolve environmental disputes, conflict resolution mechanisms, or inclusive management [End Page 153] arrangements for competing sources of the two rivers. In other situations, formal relationships between governments are so strained, or their implementation capacities so limited, that non-official groups can often be more effective in fostering collaborative solutions than the countries themselves. A more informal approach, broadly called Track II water diplomacy, has continued to grow among regional actors as a way to support formal efforts while simultaneously easing the impacts of rising water security threats.

Track II diplomacy—informal, non-governmental, and unofficial contacts and activities between private individuals or non-state actors—can provide countries with additional and alternative channels of communication and fora for dialogue. These efforts are not intended to supplant, but rather supplement official (i.e., Track I) diplomacy efforts to manage and resolve conflict over shared water resources. Track II initiatives include data-sharing activities, professional and academic exchanges, community and grassroots level dialogues, and non-governmental workshops. These activities often examine the origins of tensions and explore possible solutions outside formal environmental negotiations. Often run by NGOs, research institutions, universities, or even private companies, these unofficial efforts try to engage a range of stakeholders, from official government representatives to non-profit organizations, involved in water management and research.

The Stimson Center, in partnership with the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) in Pakistan and the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) in India, completed a Track II project in 2013 with the goal of fostering these forms of cooperation in the Indus Basin. The initiative brought together twenty-five analysts and practitioners from a diverse range of professional and disciplinary backgrounds, including agronomists, economists, engineers, disaster management experts, and former national policymakers. Over the course of eighteen months, this Indus Basin Working Group met for two three-day workshops and a series of web-based dialogues to consider the context, concerns, and objectives for water policy in the Indus Basin.

The project’s outcome was a set of jointly authored recommendations (a policy “roadmap”) that set forth a menu of next-steps for regional collaboration and exchange on transboundary issues.³⁷ The final report was collaboratively composed, rather than attributed to individual authors, in order to represent the collective counsel of Indian, Pakistani, and American participants. In addition to being distributed to national and regional policymakers, the report has been adopted by World Bank as a guiding input for future programs in the Indus Basin under the Bank’s South Asia Water Initiative (SAWI).

Conclusion

Water is, and will continue to be, the world’s most vital natural resource. As such, it will remain a subject of contention within communities and across borders. Even within relatively wealthy, stable countries the threat of water scarcity looms, as prolonged droughts in California and Sao Paolo have recently reminded international water experts. For global conflict basins, the [End Page 154] combination of political adversity, natural resource scarcity, and climatic and demographic shifts will continue to challenge effective water governance. The coming century will bring unprecedented environmental change, and with it, the need for unprecedented levels of cooperation.

Fortunately, there is evidence that efforts to manage conflict and foster peaceful arrangements can work, even in international environments fraught with pre-existing tensions. Governments, international organizations, development agencies, and civil society groups all increasingly recognize the scope for hydro-diplomacy to promote water cooperation over conflict.³⁸ Water is assuredly a national security interest for states, but it remains an essential part of regional systems. Instead of securitizing or militarizing efforts to protect and maintain water supplies, which can pit neighboring nations against each other, the global community should learn from ongoing collaborations and partnerships. Part of conflict mitigation and increased cooperation is further engagement in research and transparency. Increased understanding of transboundary dynamics, as well as future climate change impacts, will only improve the ability of decision-makers to negotiate equitable and sustainable frameworks. And, like other governance efforts, increased transparency—through modeling, data-sharing, and public participation—only furthers the ability of stakeholders to judge the effectiveness, fairness, and continued integrity of cooperative arrangements.

Whether through international or regional diplomacy, or via Track II initiatives, water basin collaborations are proven approaches to balance competing interests and, if not solve, at least navigate parties away from impending conflict. Understanding that water management is not a zero-sum game but a mutual necessity presents a path to move beyond individual national concerns toward a broader dialogues. By doing so, countries will not only secure their own resource interests for decades to come, but will build a foundation for further cooperation and regional security in the face of looming threats.