There has been growing public and policy preoccupation in recent years with potential climate impacts on water security in the wake of the worsening risk of global warming. In 1991, then–UN secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali pronounced that “the next war will be fought over water, not politics.” In 2001, Kofi Annan warned that “fierce competition for fresh water may well become a source of conflict and wars in the future.” And present UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon has argued that the ongoing Darfur crisis grew at least in part from desertification, ecological degradation, and a scarcity of resources, foremost among them water. Apart from this chorus of concern, many policy scholars have asserted that, as population growth and economic development raise pressures on demand and environmental pressures degrade supplies, resource scarcities could precipitate violent international conflicts, with shared rivers an especially dangerous flashpoint.The mounting trepidation that water and other resource conflicts, exacerbated by global warming, could undermine the international order has now become part of the public policy. The European Union explicitly invokes the danger that climate stresses could menace global security as a basis for European Community climate policies.

While evaluating the risk of prospective water wars against the historical evidence, a group of scholars rummaged through data sets covering 124 countries and 122 of the world’s 265 international river basins, and identified 1,831 interstate events between 1946 and 1999 that concerned water. It was observed that cooperation far outweighed confrontation, representing 67 percent of events. Of 507 incidents judged conflictual, 414 amounted to only rhetorical exchanges. In all, they found 37 instances of military or violent confrontation. In no case did disputes over water lead to formal declarations of war. On the contrary, riparians in transboundary basins signed fully 157 international freshwater treaties over the same period.

Undoubtedly, the study by Wolf et al. is widely cited to deflate anxious claims that strains on water supplies will ignite future water wars and to highlight the predominantly collaborative character of interstate hydropolitics, yet, there are several reasons to fear that previous levels of international cooperation will not necessarily continue to prevail.

Broadly speaking, examples of cooperation considerably outnumber cases of conflict, but this accounting may not accurately reflect the dynamic degree of tension over water resources that riparians experience. That no state formally declared war on another over water carries almost no probative value. According to broad estimates, water issues contributed to “only” 37 violent incidents —including 21 examples of “Extensive war acts causing deaths, dislocation, or high strategic cost”—to be less than reassuring. If this is already so, one may well wonder, what will happen if climate change aggravates existing strains on shared water supplies?

Here, some other expeditions into the hydropolitical archives offer more troubling evidence. While examining every transboundary river in every one of the world’s international river basins from 1880 to 2001, Gleditsch et al.  determined that, even after accounting for other factors that trigger interstate conflict, countries that share a river face a higher probability of engaging in fatal military disputes. Though not conclusive, their results also suggested that competition stemming from water scarcity may help explain this propensity. Similarly, Hensel and Brochmann in their examination of the management of every shared river in different parts of the globe from 1900 to 2001, have indicated that growing water demands and greater scarcity both make explicit disagreements over rivers more likely and heighten the risk that these claims will become militarized.

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