Political
“Fierce competition for fresh water may well become a source of conflict and wars in the future.”
(Kofi Annan, UN speech, 2001)
There are many different perspectives on which should be the role of water in the 21st century. All of them, however, agree in one thing: water will be central in the planet’s development. This once seemingly limitless resource will play a major part in where wars will happen before 2100.
Will they? There is no denying that population increase and the pollution of large water resources made the situation less comfortable, but there is not a common opinion over how the future will pan out.
“There will be water wars in the future, for sure, and we can even say that we have already had some water-related wars”, says Adel Darwish, the author of the book Water Wars. “Senegal and Mauritania went through a limited conflict, and when I interviewed Ariel Sharon for my book Water Wars, he did admit that one of the reasons to go to war in 1967 was the Syrians’ attempts to control the water resources in Sea of Galilee”, he says.
Ian Hart, director of the Pacific Institute, in America, agrees with Darwish. “As water becomes scarcer, the possibility of war increases”. For him, so far, water is rarely the main reason to spark a war, but it can exacerbate tensions in areas already under pressure for different causes.
Deadly as a war
Could a war kill 5 or 6 million people yearly? If such a disgrace took place, it would get the catastrophe status of the international community, especially if the dead belonged to America or to a European state. So we could say that there is already an ongoing war, as this is the number of casualties related to lack of fresh water every year – and most of those affected are children.
“I think that discussing that if there is going to be water wars or not is not the issue”, affirms the Aaron Wolf, researcher of the Oregon State University. “The issue is that 2,5 to 5 million people die simply with the current status quo. That’s the issue. Water wars is simply a diversion of the problem, which is much more serious than any other war. It’s a dangerous diversion of the actual priorities.”
Warspots
For Adel Darwish, the natural places to site wars for water are those with three conditions: increasing population, scarce resources and natural tension in the region. “There are two kinds of possible conflicts to take place”, he explains. “The direct conflicts, where countries openly clash and also the indirect, where countries secretly support rebel groups to disrupt hostile neighbours. “
“We can talk about indirect war, where the countries don’t declare war, but support gorilla-groups. That is very much on the agenda”.
Stefan Deconinck, of the University of Brussels, makes an interesting remark about Israeli policy on water. “From an Israeli perspective, Syria taking control of these resources is a threat. The surface water is strategic not because Israel hasn’t water for itself, but because they want to control the water for agriculture. Agriculture is politically and symbolically vital, because the state of Israel considers agriculture as one of the basis of the country, like ‘ build up a new society, make the desert blue’. They can cope with less water but the symbols handling is vital.”
