No chance of water wars

This field examines relations between hydro-climatic factors, conflict and adaptation at the national scale (Table 1). Findings suggest that cooperation trumps violent conflict by far, and that acute disputes involving violence are very limited with the only evidence for a genuinely water war pointing to an event 4,500 year ago (Wolf 2007). Countries sharing rivers engage more in disputes (Gleditsch et al. 2006) but when separating the effects of shared border and shared water the significance of the latter is reduced (Toset et al. 2000). Drought has no influence on disputes but the size of the basin does, suggesting that water abundance and related economic opportunities (e.g. hydropower) may be causing conflict (Gleditsch et al. 2006).

What accounts for this relative lack of hydro-scarcity conflict? Institutional arrangements seem to mitigate the risk of conflict (Tir and Stinnett 2012) depending on the design and efficacy of international water treaties. Countries with larger shared basins and larger GDP and population differences are more likely to enter a treaty agreement (Song and Whittington 2004). Compensations and side-payments are a common treaty mechanism in water quality agreements, but not in water quantity ones (Dombrowsky 2007). In a climate change context, resilient treaties adopt portfolio approaches that spread uncertainty risks by including diverse management arrangements simultaneously in open-ended strategies rather than rigid, codified rules (Drieschova et al. 2011). Also, transboundary water management institutions that are unable to absorb and effectively manage change—which points to the importance of time given to absorb change – as well as large or rapid changes in a basin’s physical (e.g. dam construction) or political (e.g. breakup of a nation) setting can be two key conflict-likelihood increasing factors (Wolf 2009).

However, a more critical perspective on institutions and cooperation questions binary distinctions between cooperation and conflict and problematizes institutional ‘solutions’. The term hydro-hegemony refers to the covert use of power by a State to perpetuate water-sharing arrangements that while on the surface appear cooperative are in practice inequitable and unreasonable, yet tolerated and stable as they are not readily challenged (Woodhouse and Zeitoun 2008). Selby (2003) holds that Israelis and their neighbours do not fight over water; rather the Israeli Administration uses control of scarce water as a tool for subjugating Palestinians.

If water wars are unlikely, then why the media and policy hype? First, water may not be a cause of war yet but may become in the future due to climate change (De Stefano et al. 2012). Second, wars may not be fought over water, but caused by consequences of its scarcity, e.g. rising food prices or scarce arable land (Serageldin 2009). Possible wars related to land-grabs are a case in point. Finally, although unfounded, statements about water wars may persist because some key actors—policymakers, academics, journalists, and NGO activists—have incentives to exaggerate their probability (Katz 2011).

3.2 Climate, water and armed conflict

This field uses large-N datasets of countries or regions to examine correlations between hydroclimatic variability and civil conflict, controlling for socio-economic and political factors. Although under certain social conditions they might aggravate the risk of conflict, scarcity and climate change are overall not found to have an important association with armed conflict, especially if compared to poverty and dysfunctional institutions (Gleditsch 2012).

Lower rainfall levels and negative rainfall shocks are more associated to increased conflict risk in sub-Saharan Africa (Miguel et al. 2004), though the specification of rainfall intervals of the study has been criticised, and the result is not robust to different specifications (Ciccone 2011). In a similar study, Burke et al. 2009 find that global warming, could increase probabilities of armed conflict incidence in Africa by 54 % until 2030, but due to temperature increases, not rainfall changes. These results too are sensitive to the time period and severity threshold used and are not reproducible with alternative specifications (Buhaug 2010). Other studies conclude that climate variability is a poor predictor of armed conflict (Hendrix and Glaser 2007). Political exclusion of ethnic groups rather than a drought-conflict nexus drives conflict, and this is not influenced by drought occurrence, suggesting that water may not even be a threat multiplier (Theisen et al. 2011).