No water wars – predictions are too simplistic and ignore empirics.

Jeroen Warner & Sumit Vij, “No, There Will Not Be a War for Water,” New Security Beat, January 10, 2022, https://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2022/01/no-war-water/

Defense ministers, military generals, NGOs, UN Secretaries-General and environment-focused academics all repeat the misguided hypothesis that increasing resource scarcity leads to conflict. Since Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth movie, the narrative keeps expanding to include climate-induced mass migration, climate disasters, and even climate wars.

Indian geostrategist Brahma Chellaney has recently argued that water is the new oil and claims that water will be the centerpiece of power struggle in Asia. This year, tensions between Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt over filling the enormous Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Nile River has also refueled water war theories. After the summer floods in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, European Commissioner Frans Timmermans repeatedly predicted that there will be future wars over food and water unless there are 55 percent reductions in carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. Military analysts such as retired Dutch General Tom Middendorp, chairman of the International Military Council on Climate and Security, has repeatedly aligned himself with the water wars (and climate-induced mass migration) discourse. The Water, Peace, and Security Partnership was set up by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the German Agency for International Cooperation and a consortium of six partners to forecast and understand water-related conflicts and organized violence.

Climate change will intensify weather extremes, but extremes alone do not cause violent conflict. As Dr. Clionadh Raleigh of Sussex University said, “It’s just a simplistic, nonsense narrative that the climate makes people violent.” Violence is only one, rarely used coping strategy for stress and sudden change. Multiple factors have to interact in complex ways before they create an escalating crisis. And even then, as Professor Aaron Wolf’s extensive Oregon State University database shows, states have not gone to war over water only. As Naho Mirumachi has shown, a mix of conflict and cooperation is more likely.