The Fight For The World’s Water
In a thirsty world, the globe’s powers are silently fighting for our most precious resource.
This article originally appeared on Medium
A Thirsty, Crowded Planet
Water has always defined the story of human civilisations. When you look at the map, it’s no coincidence that mankind’s major cities are located near rivers or other water sources.
The distinguished cultures of ancient Egypt, Babylon, or the Indus Valley all exceeded because of access to the bountiful rivers of the Nile, Tigris and Euphratus and Sarasvati. And, just as water defined the success of an empire, the loss of it would swiftly lead to collapse. Drought and a loss of water has been identified by historians to have caused the fall of complex societies everywhere from China to the Central American isthmus.
And the modern world is no exception. While we may consider ourselves more civilised than these ancient peoples, we are imbued with the same animal desire to survive, and this brings with it a willingness to do battle over dwindling and precious resources.
This has only intensified in the modern world. Earth today is hotter, more populous and industrial than it has ever been, and as a result water is now more valuable than at any point throughout history.
Of all the water on the world’s surface, less than 1% of it is drinkable, either coming from rivers, lakes, or underground aquifers. The amount of drinkable water has remained relatively stable throughout history, being recycled through numerous human bodies and by nature, or remaining untouched beneath the surface of the earth, or frozen in isolated glaciers.
But the human population has remained anything but stable. Since the advent of industrial society, we have witnessed a eight-fold increase since the year 1800. And we can project that it will continue to grow. The next ten years will witness an extra one billion people alive at the end of it than now.
All of these people rely on a meagre amount of water. Not just for sustaining themselves, but to produce the food they eat, and the clothes they wear.
A Coming Global Dust Bowl?
As the planet continues to heat, we can expect to see a rise in droughts across the globe. A report from a research firm associated with the credits rating agency Moody’s has predicted cases of severe drought afflicting North America and Europe towards the middle of the decade.
The report argues that this grim prediction is ‘locked in’ by the amount of pollution already present in the atmosphere. This means that, even if we were immediately transition to an eco-friendly economic system, we would still see much of the damage because of the time it will take CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere.
The report is written for large investing institutions who are seeking to understand the changing world to protect their financial assets. The serious and clear-eyed nature of the report is worth anybody taking notice of. Among the predictions contained within, it warns that entire swathes of the world will experience water stress not seen before. Regions which already suffer from insecure access to freshwater, such as West Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, look set to experience large scale crop failure and river evaporation.
The West will not be spared this either, with the Southern Mediterranean and south-central United States experiencing a 20% drop in rainfall. We have already seen California, a state with an economy larger than the UK, suffering from repeated water scarcity, and we can expect to see this manifesting at an increasing rate in the coming years.
Water Wars
In a world like this, water is power. The people of the West might not realise this yet, but outside powers certainly do.
China, for instance, long ago began aggressive moves for control of Asia’s limited freshwater sources. This campaign began in the 1950’s when Chairman Mao invaded the peaceful and isolated country of Tibet. With their brutal repression and annexation of the Tibetan people, the Chinese Communist Party gained dominance over Asia’s largest freshwater stocks and the hearts of many of it’s greatest rivers.
Controlling Tibet has given China a dominant hand within the heart of Asia’s water supply.
Obviously this allows them to exploit the water for their own population and industry but it also lets them threaten other countries. India, China’s neighbour, has been a consistent rival since it’s independence from the British, with them fighting several small skirmishes against one another.
Recently, New Delhi has been trying to act as a balance against the rising Chinese state, most recently by resisting it’s Belt and Road Initiative. China has responded by damming the numerous rivers those tributaries India depends upon, potentially threatening millions of Indians who rely on it’s water for sustenance and agriculture.
To the south, the same dynamic is playing out between India and Pakistan. These two countries are also bitter rivals and have continually battled over the divided province of Kashmir. While mostly a part of India, Kashmir is considered to have a Islamic identity and has played host to a number of separatist and Islamist guerrilla organisations
An already complex situation is made worse by water conflict. Kashmir is just south of the Tibetan plateau and is one of the primary sources of the mighty Indus river which flows downstream throughout the entirety of Pakistan. The geography and political control is aligned in such a way that Pakistan is almost completely dependent upon India for access to this water.
While the two countries have signed a tentative treaty to share the water, the military class who have ruled Pakistan for most of it’s history live in perpetual that India will choke off their country’s access to this vital river.
India, for their part, has repeatedly threatened to do just that. Most recently in 2019 when Kashmiri Islamist militants (believed to have links to the Pakistani intelligence services) murdered forty Indian police officers in a gruesome terrorist attack. This prompted New Delhi to threaten Pakistan with cutting the flow of the Ravi river, a tributary of the Indus.
This is a story which is repeated across Eurasia and Africa. In Eastern Anatolia, where Turkey meets the Fertile Crescent and mountains of North-Western Iran, water has only added to the long running fight between the Turkish state and its restive and sizable Kurdish minority.
The Kurds of Turkey number some fifteen million and are situated almost entirely in the country’s south-east, which also happens to be the most water-rich part of the country. The area is the location of the Van lake and the source of the Tigris and Euphratus rivers, which run downstream into the rest of region.
Turkey, and the Ottoman Empire previously, have always depended upon these rivers for economic clout, but also to pressure their southern neighbours to comply with Turkish interests. This is one of the reasons that Turkey has repeatedly tried to crush Kurdish aspirations for independence, whether by genocide, or integrating the Kurdish political groups into the state structure.
If there was ever to be an independent Kurdish state, it would have a dominating stake over the region’s most important rivers and freshwater resources and be able to claim the mantel of a ‘water power,’ a prized designation in a region mostly composed of desert, and an increasingly dry world.
A World In Constant Movement
The original Dust Bowl which hit the American hinterland in the 1930’s generated large-scale migration into the US’ depression-hit cities.
If history is any guide, does this mean we will see a similar situation play out on a global level? Will this lead to massive migratory movement into developing world urban choke points, and the colder areas of the Global North? Most likely.
A fairly recent example of this occurred in Syria towards the end of the 2010’s. Syria had started the millennium as a one of the Middle East’s breadbaskets and enjoyed consistent water access and rainfall. However, the years 2007 to 2010 would see a drought strike the entire region, which witnessed some 1.5 million farmers lose their land to desertification.
These millions of rural-dwellers were forced into the outskirts of Syria’s metropolitan cities were they joined the swelling ranks of the urban poor.
Drought was not the only reason for agriculture collapse. There was state mismanagement of water and endemic corruption. As well, once the revolt actually started, Syria’s military began a scorched earth policy of destruction of farmland to starve out rebels. This meant that a drought-induced famine which could have been recovered from became a wide-spread ecological and economic disaster.
If this continues, we can expect the movements of people within the world’s most arid areas to continue and intensify throughout the the coming decade. Many of these people will find themselves cramped into already overcrowded cities and urban areas across the developing world. Many will try to move north into wealthy states of North America and Europe.
What this means for an EU which is already riven with divisions between it’s rich and liberal North and it’s poor and conservative South and East is anybody’s guess but it will likely entrench the nationalist uprising that made itself known in the later parts of the 2010’s.
Solutions
The situation is not completely hopeless. Just as human beings have been (mostly) able to stave off famine via the advent of new technologies and ways of farming, we can do that with our water shortage.
One such solution which is being touted is ‘de-salanisation’ technology. This is a micro-filtering process which aims to remove saline and other undrinkable material from seawater, creating an artificial form of reverse osmosis.
Israel has acted as a proof of concept that this can actually work. While Syria was being devastated by the drought of 2007, Israel took drastic action and began rationing it’s limited water supply and establishing a series of desalination facilities across the country.
This experiment has proved a remarkable success, making Israel the only country in the Middle east which actually has a surplus of available water. Now we have seen the Israeli agricultural sector bloom and wholes swathes of the country turning green as that water is used to push back the dessert.
The opportunities that this technology affords within the region could be massive. If the same national project which has helped Israel push back the dessert and reclaim it’s water can be exported across the Fertile Crescent region into countries like Syria and Iraq, we could see the rebirth of the greenery which prompted the development of civilisation in this area all those centuries ago.
For this to happen, however, will require overcoming deeply held hatreds and divisions on both sides. Most Arab nations will not want to depend upon Israeli expertise for something as vital as their water.
Israel, for it’s part, could be divided on the issue. Many Israelis will be perfectly happy to see the states which have often threatened their country dry up and internally collapse. However, the military and political elite of Israeli society will likely realise the opportunity that this technology provides to become a regional hegemon and to generate goodwill from elites in Cairo and Riyadh, both of whose rule is existentially threatened by the Middle East’s declining water stocks.
This is only one possible solution. The recycling of waste water could also prove necessary and has been shown to work in several African countries.
Likely, it will be a combination of both.
Whatever solution is adopted for the world’s water crisis, it’s almost certain that it will require multi-national co-operation which will be open to disruption from political differences and deeply embedded national rivalries.
Whether we are capable of seeing past these issues to achieve this could be the big question of the 21st century.