Managing Water Conflict and Cooperation

Related Links

• State of the World 2005
• Online Feature: Global Security

Worldwatch Live Online Discussion

Geoffrey Dabelko: Director, Environmental Change and Security Project, The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

June 9, 2005 - 2:00pm EDT

Water is rarely the cause of major conflict between countries; however, competing needs from agriculture, dams, recreational users, and ecosystems fuel disputes that can worsen existing tensions. Despite the challenges posed by transboundary water basins and diminishing water supplies, governments and local groups from countries around the world have developed creative solutions to water shortages and sharing resources.

Geoffrey Dabelko, Director of the Environmental Change and Security Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and contributing author of State of the World 2005 joined us for this in-depth look at water conflicts around the world and how communities and governments are finding cooperative solutions and preventing conflict.

Steve Conklin, Worldwatch Institute: Welcome to this week's Worldwatch Live Online Discussion. Today's guest is State of the World 2005 author and Director of the Environmental Change and Security Project at The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Geoffrey Dabelko. Welcome, Geoffrey!

Geoffrey Dabelko: "Thanks Steve and thanks Worldwatch. It is a real pleasure to be participating in this webchat and to have co-authored two chapters in State of the World 2005."

Browns Valley, CA 95918: Ground Water and Air Pollution. Ground water is used for irrigation in California's central valley. Yuba County has made strides in the past to replenish ground water from season to season. Unlike other areas of the state, ground water levels stay fairly constant. About the same as the river levels. There are plans to build slurry walls to control flooding in places like Natomas and Plumas Lakes. This is something like building a negative lake. If there is less ground water to draw due to these negative lakes, what will the effect be on air pollution? Diesel engines are used to power ground water pumps. What is the relationship between gound water depth and air pollution from diesel pumps? What are the alternatives to building these negative lakes?

Geoffrey Dabelko: California indeed has a long history of balancing flood control projects with water availability with an early example, for better or worse, being the construction of the Hoover Dam in Nevada to check the flooding of the Colorado River into California. The particular project you refer to, The Yuba River Basin Flood Control Project, is a $4 million US Army Corps of Engineers project intended to stop the seepage of water under existing levees.

If in fact diesel pumps are used to draw water after the project is completed then the potential air pollution will be dependent on many variables. Public exposure to the exhaust will depend on the types and sizes of the engines, run cycles, location, and local weather to name a few. Broadly speaking, the higher the pump has to lift the water, the more fuel the pump will use and the more fumes it will emit. Electric engines are an alternative to diesel pumps in this case. More information on how diesel fumes in general are affecting California air quality can be found at: http://www.oehha.ca.gov/air/pdf/dieselfact2.pdf

Zutphen, The Netherlands: What would be the effect on global water resources, if from July 2005 every citizen on earth would choose for a vegan diet en would stick to that vegan diet for the rest of their life?

Geoffrey Dabelko: You've touched on an important point related to food security and water usage - food production is hugely water intensive. Based on a recent report commissioned by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) as input into the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD): LET IT REIGN: The New Water Paradigm for Global Food Security, "a balanced human diet based on a kcal consumption of 3000 kcal/day rep-resents water depletion of 3500 litres per person per day (l/p/d), 70 times greater than the 50 l/p required for basic household water needs." The following chart is illustrative of the vast differences in water usage necessary for beef production vs. other, less water intensive protein sources.

Food item Water requirement
Cubic meters of water /kg (average*)
Beef (grain fed) 15 or more
Fresh lamb 10
Fresh poultry 3.5-6
Cereals 0.6-2
Soybeans 1-2
Palm oil 2
Pulses, roots and tubers 1

* Figure ranges are due to variations in climate, water and agricultural
management and methods of calculation

We must be careful, however, with sweeping generalizations about the policy implications of this data. Given a complex international trade system and the sometimes unforeseen consequences of dramatic shifts in diet toward unsustainable agriculture practices, it's difficult to say what the literal water impact would be of a world where protein sources were 100% exclusive of meat. More short-term options are geared toward looking at water efficiency and infrastructure issues along with more research into nutrient-rich food options that are low on the water usage scale.

info from: http://www.siwi.org/downloads/Reports/2005%20CSD%20Report%20Food.pdf

Other sites include:
http://earthtrends.wri.org/text/agriculture-food/feature-24.html
http://www.fao.org/waicent/faoinfo/agricult/agl/aglw/aquastat/water_res/index.stm

Washington, DC: What is the most important thing that the citizens of the United States need to do to limit conflicts over water both internationally and within our own borders?

Geoffrey Dabelko: First and foremost U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike can examine carefully ways they can reduce their own use of water by using less for some things and finding substitutes for water for other things (dry sanitation etc.). Start at home. Scaling up such conservation is necessary to begin to address water conflict within the United States. One thinks immediately of the dry Southwest where farmers, ranchers, environmentalists, and thirsty city dwellers commonly square off over scarce water. Given that agricultural irrigation is by far the largest user of water, conservation in that sector is a key place to look. One could also fairly say that building cities in the middle of the desert isnít particularly sustainable behavior either.

On the international level, it is critical to support international and regional bodies that facilitate negotiations among states sharing a river basin. The UN, the World Bank, and bilateral commissions are all active in many basins around the world. But it cannot just be the official negotiations that are supported. Key is lending support to civil society groups that are also active in facilitating dialogue and cooperation on the basin level such as the Nile Basin Discourse group. It is the civil society analog to the Nile Basin Initiative, the World Bank facilitated governmental negotiations. And it is important to note that supporting US or European environmental NGOs is not the same as supporting NGOs in developing countries. It is more difficult perhaps to identify these, but direct support to some of these struggling bodies is perhaps even more effective in promoting water management that serves human as well as ecosystem needs.

Paris, France: If water is, as you said, a rarely cause of major conflict between countries, could it be an important indirect driver to domestic conflicts? Roughly, and according to my figures, the global water use could be divided in three elements: city use for about ten percents ñ agricultural use for about seventy percents ñ industry use for twenty percents. Current trends seem to indicate that the agricultural relative share is diminishing for city and industry uses. (Industrial water is more profitable; cityís growth has to be sustained Ö) What consequences do you expect from such an evolution? What kind of creative arbitration processes can we set up to maintain a well-balanced town and country planning in the future?

Geoffrey Dabelko: Paris is an appropriate source for this question ñ UNESCO is a leading body for understanding and addressing water conflict and cooperation problems. Check out the PCCP project at http://www.unesco.org/water/wwap/pccp/index.shtml.

Trends in urbanization (just recently the worldís population became more than 50% urban) ensure that intersectoral competition is here to stay and likely to become more conflictual. The larger populations in urban areas will demand larger proportions of water while simultaneously decreasing the ability of ecosystems to provide more regular and cleaner supplies. Development that reduces wetlands reduces a natural filtration service for water. Deforesting areas increases the grounds ability to absorb rainfall leading to increased runoff and siltation of local water supplies.

Yet innovative solutions are emerging. Efficiency and conservation methods continue to improve ñ we just need the will and perhaps some start up subsidies to implement them. Perhaps best known in this country was New York Cityís decision to pay a fraction of the cost of building a new waste water plant to ensure that upstate ecosystems that were the source for the cityís water stayed protected and undeveloped. Similar payments from lowland cities to dwellers in upland, usually forested areas, to project natural sources of water from development or deforestation are also at work in Mexico and Costa Rica. These benefits, often at a fraction of the cost of large water infrastructure projects, require collaborations outside the immediate areas of urban water users.

When cooperation canít be worked out, there are places to turn for mediation of disputes. The US Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution is one such resource. See http://www.ecr.gov/

Brazil: Is it a good idea to have a International Water Tribunal to resolve water conflicts?

Geoffrey Dabelko: An International Water Tribunal is in theory an appealing idea. And these bodies are in the process of being set up. The Water Cooperation Facility done by UNESCO and the World Water Council in one such body. See http://www.unesco.org/water/wwap/pccp/pdf/wcf_report_12_04.pdf These bodies could provide formal and informal advice in helping parties resolve water conflicts. The cautionary note is that these bodies must be demand driven and not supply driven to be most effective and utilized.

More formal legal structures as suggested by a tribunal can and do have a role to play but I would maintain they are limited to a special set of cases. The International Court of Justice settled the international dispute between Hungary and the Slovak Republic regarding a Gabcikovo-Nagymaros Dam on the Danube River. For a bibliography on the case, see http://www.internationalwaterlaw.org/Bibliography/Gabcikovo.htm. In that way, our existing institutions worked well.

But overwhelmingly water conflicts are local affairs, not conflicts between states that can afford to send teams of lawyers to argue out cases for months at a time. These cases need to be resolved in formal and informal means at very local levels ñ often farmer to farmer or city to city. Finding innovative ways to share lessons learned and build mediation and conflict resolution skills on these levels would appear to be the most pressing need. Programs like the Universities Partnership for Transboundary Waters are in the business of training the next generation of water managers and water conflict resolution specialists. Supporting these kinds of efforts is to me the greatest priority. See http://waterpartners.geo.orst.edu/aboutus.htm.

sanata barbara, calif: i am having difficulty with weighing the large immigration that is entering the US. Could you tell me how the enormous numbers of people that come from specifically mexico which has the worlds fastest population growth rate, going to impact the US economically and ecologicaly? thank you

Geoffrey Dabelko: Mexico has nowhere near the worldís fastest population growth rate. Mexico's population growth rate for 2000-2005 is 1.34%. The U.S. population growth rate is .97 % for the 2000-2005 period. The world population growth rate is 1.21%

The worldís 10 highest population growth rates are in the following countries:
1. United Arab Emirates 6.51%
2. Qatar 5.86%
3. Dem. Rep. of Timor-Leste 5.42%
4. Afghanistan 4.59%
5. Eritrea 4.26%
6. Sierra Leone 4.07%
7. Kuwait 3.73%
8. Chad 3.42%
9. Uganda 3.40%
10. Niger 3.39%

Data source: UN's World Population Prospects: 2004 Revision.

Brazil: What you think about the lack of a global legal regime about conservation, use and cooperation about water?

Geoffrey Dabelko: Setting targets and timetables for provision of safe and sustainable water or adequate sanitation as the Millennium Development Goals do is a valuable international agreement for stimulating action. Not enough action, but some action, attention, and study.

Establishing international law on water such as the 1997 UN Convention on Non-navigational uses of Non-Navigable Uses of International Waterways has also proven beneficial to transboundary water basin agreements, providing principles such as equitable and reasonable use and avoiding significant harm downstream. Even though this convention has not been ratified by enough countries to come into force, the principles are being adopted in regional water agreements in East and West African river basins.

These examples do not constitute a single global water regime analogous to the Framework Convention on Climate Change or Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depleting Substances. My personal view is that trying to negotiate a comprehensive convention would not be time well-spent. I have become cynical that anything meaningful could be agreed upon after having gone to the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development where the sanitation targets figured prominently in negotiations and the 2003 3rd World Water Forum in Kyoto where ministerial negotiations bogged down on attempts to codify a ìhuman rightî to water. Issues such as the human right to water, the privatization of water and service delivery, the trade in water, are all issues that would derail serious attempts. Instead I would devote as much resources and attention as possible to establishing waterís links to human health (in terms of lives and dollars). Or identifying and understanding the value(s) of water-related ecosystem services such as is highlighted in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Making progress in these areas will be much more likely to spur needed actions on the part of people and governments.

Madras School of Economics, Chennai, India: It is true that for developing countries like India, with the growing population and rapid urbanisation, the demand for fresh water is growing up from all the competiting sectors - agriculture (demands ~80-90% of fresh water), domestic (~5-7%), industry (~10-15%), environment & ecosystem, etc. Inter and intra sectoral conflicts are growing up, almost all the surface flows are consumptively utilised, and there is no left over for environmental flows, as a result less groundwater recharge and more wells failure. Apart from that surface water (river water) based drinking water schemes are also get very much affected during dry seasons, as only municipal sewage (mostly untreated or partially treated) feeds the rivers. Since there is no groundwater recharge from surface water, only options for groundwater recharge is rainfall. However, rising variability in rainfall along with the encraochments of traditional water harvesting structures resulted in leass recharge. So, only recahrge is possible from afgricultural return flow laced with deadly pesticides and fertilisers. Recently, there is an increasing trend for all the sectors to go for groundwater to meet the demand, as a result groundwater quantitively depleted and qualitatively degraded in many basins. In this scenario, both the regulators and so-called experts are suggesting for waste water (untreated or partially treated sewage water) based irrigation activities, and there are provisions for indutries to discharge their effleuents on land. Since the land disposal is less stringent, hence most of the indutries are going for that. As a result, both groundwater water is getting polluted and application of polluted groundwater for irrigation is degrading the soils. Question: Do any other nation suggest for waste water or effleuent based irrigation (agricultural activities)? if not why?

Geoffrey Dabelko: Effluent based irrigation is widely recognized as a viable alternative to obtain water for agricultural purposes. According to ìThe Future Role of the Use of Sewage Effluent for Irrigation in the Near Eastî published for the Centre International de Hautes Etudes Agronomiques Mediterraneennes by Abdullah Arar (available online at http://ressources.ciheam.org/om/pdf/a01/CI000392.pdf), health risks and soil damage are minimal if done properly. This study also reports that 1,000 people produce enough wastewater to irrigate 1,500-2,500 ha.

Converting the nutrients found in wastewater back into the plant cycle also means that these nutrients will not cause nutrient overloading of marine and river waters and the resulting dead zones of those waters. Many countries do have policies that regulate effluent based irrigation. The Environmental Protection Agency of the United States has available online guidelines for the re-use of effluent for irrigation purposes at: http://www.epa.nsw.gov.au/mao/effluentreuse.htm.

Tbilisi (geogria): If there is a political conflict between countries that share same transboundary river is there a chance for these countries to have any kind of transboundary cooperation on the River basin until conflict is solved? What the world experience shows? What is best starting point for cooperation in this kind of sitution?

Geoffrey Dabelko: When countries are in conflict over non-water issues, water can in fact serve as a lifeline for dialogue. The hope is that dialogue and cooperative management, even when countries are at war, can provide one basis for confidence-building between peoples and between governments. We see India and Pakistan abiding by the terms of the Indus River Treaty while fighting three wars. Israel and Jordan met regularly in the so-called Picnic Table Talks to manage water in the Jordan River basin before they signed a peace treaty in 1994. And we shouldnít just limit our vision to state to state cooperation. Friends of the Earth Middle East for example, an NGO headed jointly by a Palestinian, Jordanian, and an Israeli, pair communities across the boundaries of conflict in their Good Water Makes Good Neighbors program. The communities learn about one another as they jointly address their mutual water and sanitation interdependencies. See http://www.foeme.org/main/newsletter28.htm and http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?topic_id=1413&fuseaction=topics.event_summary&event_id=19945

This lifeline role is just one of at least four distinct roles water can play between parties before, during, or after conflict. Cooperation around water can support conflict prevention among countries in a shared river basin for example. Although the Nile Basin Initiative is not explicitly portrayed as a conflict prevention effort, the basin-wide collaborations on water to meet development needs have at their heart a conflict prevention function (See http://www.nilebasin.org/). The overheated politicians rhetoric about coming water wars most often emanates from Egyptian leaders in this basin (Anwar Sadat, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Ismail Serageldin). In other circumstance, water may not have caused the conflict in the first place, but parties in conflict must include water in their negotiations to get out of conflict and achieve peace. Water for example is not why India and Pakistan are at odds. But just as in the Israeli-Palestinian example, India and Pakistan have made water one of the six negotiating group topics as the countries inch toward reconciliation. In post-conflict settings, water may be an avenue for the former adversaries to build trust and cooperation. The UN Environment Programmeís Post-Conflict Assessment Unit is bringing Iraqi and Iranian scientists together for the first time in 29 years around the effort to restore the Mesopotamian Marshlands that are shared by the two countries. See http://postconflict.unep.ch/index.htm. And the fourth pathway is the water as lifeline argument as outlined above. If you are interested in more examples of these four environmental pathways to peace, see my recent paper ìFrom Threat to Opportunity: Exploiting Environmental Pathways to Peaceî that I prepared for the May 2005 Tehran conference on Environment, Peace, and the Dialogue among Civilizations and Cultures where all participants were doing a little environmental confidence-building. Trip summary and paper available at http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1413&fuseaction=topics.item&news_id=130895

Steve Conklin, Worldwatch Institute: Thanks for joining us today, Geoff, and thank you for providing such informative answers and web links to our participants questions!

Geoffrey Dabelko: Thanks Steve. The chat was good fun and it was a great pleasure working with everyone at Worldwatch on the book.

I want take this opportunity to thank and acknowledge my co-authors in the two chapters I co-authored for Worldwatchís State of the World 2005. On the Managing Water Conflict and Cooperation chapter, I was part of a team that included Oregon Stateís Aaron Wolf and Adelphi Researchís Annika Kraemer and Alexander Carius. On the Building Peace through Environmental Cooperation, I worked with my long-time collaborators Ken Conca at the University of Maryland and Alexander Carius at Berlinís Adelphi Research. Many of the insights from this work are theirs. We have all benefited from the Wilson Centerís Navigating Peace Water Initiative, a multi-year effort supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Read more at http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?topic_id=1413&fuseaction=topics.item&news_id=22503

I would also like to thank my colleagues at the Woodrow Wilson Centerís Environmental Change and Security Project who are always key collaborators: Jen Kaczor, Meaghan Parker, Charlotte Youngblood, Jennifer Turner, Ali Gharib and Alicia Herron.

You can access the good work of my colleagues at:

Oregon State University Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database - http://www.transboundarywaters.orst.edu/
Adelphi Research - http://www.adelphi-research.de
University of Maryland Harrison Program on the Future Global Agenda - http://www.bsos.umd.edu/harrison/
Woodrow Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Project
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/ecsp