Water Security, Cooperation and Conflict
Publisher: Geneva Centre for Security Policy
Author(s): David Michel
Date: 2016
Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Causes, Cooperation, Governance, Renewable Resources
Countries: Armenia, Colombia, Cote d'Ivoire, El Salvador, Guatemala
- Growing populations and economies, unsustainable consumption practices and mounting environmental challenges are exerting increasing pressure on the world’s freshwater resources. Many observers fear that impending shortfalls between rising demand and shifting supplies could foster sharpened competition among nations or communities attempting to secure increasingly scarce water resources.
- History furnishes little evidence of actual water wars, but violent international water-related confrontations do occur and frictions over water can also fuel internal conflicts within countries.
- A range of indirect factors such as political institutions, economic conditions, and social perceptions affect the relationship between environmental pressures and conflict risks. Inequitable allocation of the costs and benefits of water development and inadequate access to decision-making processes around water often loom larger in generating conflict than the unequal allocation of or inadequate access to the physical resource itself.
- International treaties and integrated water resource management approaches provide important tools for collective risk reduction and dispute resolution. Policymakers should further develop these cooperative governance mechanisms, effectively adapt them to new challenges such as climate change, and extend them to regions where they are currently lacking.