Water Wars - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 171

ing environmental expert, famously predicted that with 263 international river basins
and 273 international aquifers “the wars of the next century will be over water.”
A 2008 report by International Alert , a peace-building organization based in Lon-
don, identified forty-six countries with a combined population of 2.7 billion people
where contention over water has created “a high risk of violent conflict” by 2025.
Thus far, actual wars over water are more difficult to pinpoint. In the 1980s and
1990s, a dramatic decrease in rainfall was blamed on overgrazing and tree cutting in
Darfur , Sudan. Violence flared between farmers and nomadic herders of different tribes,
leaving three hundred thousand dead and 2.5 million people displaced. But the war in
Darfur, which continues to flare up, was the result of many complex ethnic, religious,
and political factors and is not strictly a “water war.”
Similarly, droughts were arguably responsible—or, at least, were important contrib-
uting factors—for starting the Taliban uprising in Afghanistan and the Maoist insur-
gency in Nepal. But those conflicts also have complex roots, and neither is an example
of a pure water war.
In researching water conflict, Dr. Aaron Wolf , of Oregon State University's Institute
for Water and Watersheds, found that the only actual water war recorded between na-
tions occurred some forty-five hundred years ago, between the city-states of Lagash and
Umma in the Tigris-Euphrates basin. Since the late 1940s, Wolf found, water-cooperat-
ive events have outnumbered water-conflictive events by 2.5 to 1, even in some of the
world's most unstable regions.
Nevertheless, diplomats at the UN remain concerned about the building tension
around resources and have made water awareness one of the UN Development Goals, a
list of initiatives that aim to reduce by half the number of people without safe drinking
water by 2015.
It may be that the very thing causing tension between tribes or nations—that they
share limited supplies of water while contending with increasing demand—proves the
best inoculant against water wars in coming years. If one nation usurps or destroys a
neighbor's water supply, then it, too, will suffer, but if both nations work to share water
fairly, then both will benefit.
When I spoke to him in 2007, Jan Eliasson , a former president of the UN General
Assembly who has made water a personal cause while mediating disputes from Bosnia
to Iran, had just returned from Darfur. “Water is one of the root causes of war
there—not the only one, but a very important complicating factor,” he explained. “Water
is crucial. If we could solve the situation logically, it would be through efforts to share ir-
rigation and other resources. You have to get people out of their helplessness and hope-
lessness.”