Sharing Cross-Border Water Resources: Cooperation or Conflict?
Apr 5, 2022
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Ruby Russell
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From the Euphrates to the Mekong, dams that ensure one country's water supply risk leaving others parched.
According to the UN, close to 300 international water treaties have been signed since 1948, and the vast majority rarely make headlines. But shared water resources can be a source of peace as well as conflict. International tensions over water, Moore says, rarely escalate into full-blown conflict. And when disputes do flare, water is often a proxy for other issues.
Yet shared water resources can also be an opportunity for cooperation. Even in Crimea, had the international community engaged Russia and Ukraine in how to solve the humanitarian issue of water, it might have "given them a possibility or a forum to negotiate, to discuss how to address this issue, and also solve other issues," Ashok says. The Water Peace and Security online tool, built by partners including IHE Delft in the Netherlands and the World Resources Institute, shows a map of our planet peppered with tensions over water that threaten to turn violent. In February, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam finally switched on, despite ongoing objections from Egypt and Sudan, who have long feared the dam's impact on their farmlands further down the Nile. Dams springing up along the Mekong River in China, meanwhile, have been blamed for drought in Thailand and Cambodia. And tensions between rivals India and Pakistan have been rising over their shared waters in the Indus River basin.