THE POLITICS OF RUNNING OUT OF WATER

By Malcolm G. Scully

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education, 11/17/2000, Vol. 47 Issue 12, pB18, 2p.

A VICE PRESIDENT of the World Bank predicted in 1995 that "the wars of the next century will be over water." Thus far, the forecast of Ismail Serageldin, now director of the World Commission on Water for the 21st Century, remains just that, and few observers expect hostilities to break out at any moment. But a recent spate of popular and scholarly articles and books suggests that we are indeed facing a "water crisis" that poses a serious threat to social, economic, and environmental stability.

In an article titled "Running Dry" in Harper's Magazine (July 2000), Jacques Leslie, a journalist who covered the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, writes: "When I was a war correspondent twenty-five years ago, I paid more attention to blood than to water. Carnage transfixed and terrified me; water seemed to flow inconsequentially.... Now when I envision the globe, I try to see beyond political boundaries to the world as it really is: a collection of watersheds, lakes, rivers, and aquifers that together maintain the earth's biota....Now the world's quotidian skirmishes and conflagrations are mere background noise. Now it is water that scares me.

"We face an unassailable fact: we are running out of freshwater," Leslie adds. "In the last century we humans have so vastly expanded our use of water to meet the needs of industry, agriculture, and a burgeoning population that now, after thousands of years in which water has been plentiful and free, its scarcity threatens the supply of food, human health, and global ecosystems."

Almost daily, the press provides specific examples of the crisis: protests and threats of violence over plans to construct a huge dam in the Indian state of Gujarat; reports than an aquifer on the United States--Mexico border will run dry in 25 years; concern that the Panama Canal is running out of the water it needs to move ships through its series of locks.

The authors of several recent books predict that, whether or not water wars loom, tension and contention over its acquisition and allocation will inevitably increase. And, they suggest, devising and sustaining a system in which the economic, social, environmental, and equity issues are resolved without open conflict will require tough choices and far more ingenuity and collaboration than have historically been applied to questions of access to and distribution of water.

As Peter H. Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute for Students in Development, Environment, and Security, writes in The World's Water: 2000-2001, "The nexus between the science of the world's water resources and the political and social implications of water availability has become one of the most exciting and complex areas for research, education, and water policy."

THE RECENT WORKS take a variety of perspectives, but they seem to concur with Sandra Postel, who writes in Pillar of Sand: Can the Irrigation Miracle Last?: "There is tittle doubt that a new politics of water scarcity is taking shape that threatens the security of nations and the stability of civil societies."

"Tensions over water security," she adds, "have the potential to incite civil unrest, spur migration, impoverish already poor regions, and destabilize governments--as well as to ignite armed conflict."

Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, a political scientist and director of the peace and conflict-studies program at the University of Toronto, cautions--in Environment, Scarcity, and Violence--that "sensational claims about 'water wars,' 'food wars,' and 'environmental refugees' in the popular literature are--almost without exception--simplistic and flawed," but he adds, "Scarcity of freshwater will be one of the chief resource issues of the twenty-first century."

Homer-Dixon writes that while water shortages and other environmental scarcities probably won't generate conventional wars, they may lead to "chronic, diffuse, subnational violence--exactly the kind of violence that bedevils conventional military institutions." As yet, he says, environmental scarcity has not been "a major factor behind these conflicts, but we can expect it to become a more-powerful influence in coming decades because of larger populations and higher per-capita resource consumption rates."

Both Homer-Dixon and Postel, a former vice president of the Worldwatch Institute who now directs the Global Water Policy Project, in Amherst, Mass., cite a series of cases in which water scarcity could lead to conflict.

Homer-Dixon suggests, for instance, that Israeli policies on allocating water in the West Bank may have been one factor in the violence there. Because aquifers in the West Bank account for about 40 percent of the ground water that Israel uses, he says, the Israeli government has strictly limited water use by both Jewish settlers and Arab residents. "But there was a stark differential in water access between the groups: on a per capita basis in the early 1990's, settlers consumed about four times as much as Arabs."

As a result, he adds, the amount of irrigated Arab farmland dwindled. Israeli water policies, "combined with the confiscation of agricultural land for settlers as well as other Israeli restrictions on Palestinian agriculture, encouraged many West Bank Arabs to abandon farming and move to town." While obviously many political, ideological, and economic factors affect the conflict-ridden area, he says, "it is reasonable to conclude that water scarcity and its economic effects contributed to the grievances behind the intifadah in these territories."

For Postel, the massive Aswan High Dam, completed on the upper Nile River in Egypt in 1970, embodies a set of interrelated issues involving "hydropolitics," irrigation, and environmental concerns. "Hard choices about how to best use the Nile's waters lie ahead," she writes. "Egypt's population will soon reach 70 million, and is projected to rise to 115 million by 2050." Despite the amount of irrigation the dam has provided, Egypt "ranks among the world's largest grain importers, and its political relations with upstream Ethiopia are strained over sharing the Nile's waters."

While the countries that draw upon the Nile have agreed to the principle of cooperation in allocating the river's water, Egypt and Ethiopia are unilaterally pursuing water-development projects that "put the two nations on a collision course," Postel writes. "Egypt is increasing its dependence on Nile water just as Ethiopia is taking actions that will reduce downstream flows."

Among environmental scientists, the Aswan Dam is viewed, at best, as a mixed blessing. As Patrick L. Osborne notes, in Tropical Ecosystems and Ecological Concepts, the lake created by the dam "does provide a more constant supply of water, but losses from the lake surface through evaporation are very high and the water supply to the lower Nile valley has not increased as much as was hoped. The dam acts as a sediment trap, and the sediments that previously built up the rich, alluvial soils of the lower Nile valley now accumulate in the reservoir. Farmers now have to apply expensive artificial fertilisers."

Osborne, executive director of the International Center for Tropical Ecology at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, adds, "The productive sardine fishery in the Mediterranean, offshore from the Nile Delta, has all but collapsed owing to the loss of the fertilisation of these waters by the nutrient-rich sediments."

THE PACIFIC INSTITUTE'S Peter Gleick believes that disenchantment with dams and other large-scale solutions to water acquisition and distribution is creating new approaches to water management.

Writing in the March 2000 issue of Water International, published by the International Water Resources Association, he notes, "The old paradigm of relying on ever-larger numbers of dams, reservoirs, and aqueducts to capture, store, and move ever-larger fractions of freshwater runoff is beginning to fail for environmental, economic, and social reasons."

In the "new paradigm," Gleick says, managers of water systems are seeking alternatives to dam building: desalination, the treatment and reuse of waste water, and irrigation methods that deliver moisture directly to the roots of plants. There have been efforts to transport water in large, oceangoing plastic bags, and to collect water from fog. Gleick reports that one such experiment "provides nearly 11,000 liters of water per day to a village in the arid coastal desert of northern Chile."

It is still far too soon to say whether such approaches can resolve the issue of water scarcity, and many observers seem to believe that they are, at best, holding actions that will put off, but not prevent, a day of reckoning. No one sees any painless way to mediate among the competing demands of agriculture, expanding urban populations, modernization, and environmental protection. And some environmental scientists fear that the last of those will be overwhelmed by the demands of the others.

Writing in the September issue of BioScience, about such issues in Asia, David Dudgeon, chairman of the department of ecology and biodiversity at the University of Hong Kong, warns that "the progression from knowledge to conservation action is not automatic. ... Pressure on governments and policymakers to regulate the flow of rivers to control flooding, provide irrigation water, and generate hydroelectric power is intense."

Dudgeon predicts that further dam building, deforestation and other changes in land use, and industrial pollution will continue to threaten the health of ecosystems throughout Asia. Over all, he says, "The prognosis is grim."

SUCH ISSUES have been raised before--most effectively in Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (Viking Penguin, 1986), a devastating analysis of the political machinations that led to the spree of dam building and water diversions that brought irrigation to the desert.

Reisner noted "that despite heroic efforts and many billions of dollars, all we have managed to do in the arid West is turn a Missouri-size section green--and that conversion has been wrought mainly with nonrenewable groundwater."

Proponents of further development in the West, he added, "seem not to understand ... how difficult it will be just to hang on to the beachhead they have made. Such a surfeit of ambition stems, of course, from the remarkable record of success we have had in reclaiming the American desert. But the same could have been said about any number of desert civilizations throughout history--Assyria, Carthage, Mesopotamia; the Inca, the Aztec, the Hohokam--before they collapsed."

Postel strikes a similar note: "The overriding lesson from history is that most irrigation-based civilizations fail," she says. "As we enter the third millennium A.D., the question is: Will ours be any different?"

With justification, we have for centuries placed our faith in humankind's ability to devise technological solutions to meet the expanding needs of an expanding population, and many believe that such solutions will be forthcoming to deal with our insatiable demand for water. And, apocalyptic predictions have a tendency to come back to mock the predictors. As Homer-Dixon points out, "Every generation feels it lives on the cusp of chaos. People invariably believe that change is too rapid and that the world is becoming too complex and unpredictable, yet in the end they often manage well."

In the short term, at least, humans will probably be able to manage water scarcity as well. Solutions will be found. The questions are how much damage and dislocation will occur in the process, and whether the resulting arrangements will be sustainable. If not, more crises loom.