Or not, if you live in Mexico City:
Mexico City officials have shut down a main pipeline providing fresh water to millions of residents because reserves have fallen to record low levels. The closure, due to last 36 hours, will affect five million people, or a quarter of the city’s population… This is the third time the capital has faced such a drastic form of water rationing this year, the BBC’s Stephen Gibbs in Mexico City reports.
Back in the 1990s, the prospect of water wars was all very exciting for students and professionals in violent conflict. The political economy of war was coming into the mainstream, with very little disagreement that diamonds and similar resources were key drivers in either generating or sustaining conflict. There was an assumption that the same could be said for any type of natural resource – including water, the “blue gold” of the twenty-first century, and thus the idea of water wars was born.
Nature magazine has pay-walled Wendy Barnaby’s original story Do nations go to war over water? but Jack Shafer covers it in Dispelling the water-war myth. Barnaby writes:
Countries do not go to war over water, they solve their water shortages through trade and international agreements.
and Shafer adds:
Water scarcity in the region results in “conflict and tension,” Barnaby adds, but the Israeli and the Palestinian officials have successfully used a committee (controlled by the Israelis) to peacefully resolve problems. In other places where competition for water should theoretically escalate into violence, Barnaby finds similar resolution…
Jared Diamond opens Collapse with a chapter in which where he describes the various environmental pressures at play in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, including the “apparently intractable” problem of managing the water supply. He quickly identifies the key weakness in Barnaby and Shafer’s optimism about negotiated solutions to these problems.
Until 2003, many of those potential conflicts in the Bitterroot Valley were amicably adjudicated for several decades by Vern Woolsey, the 82-year-old water commissioner whom everyone respected, but my Bitterroot friends are terrified at the potential for conflict now that Vern has finally stepped down.
Successful conflict resolution requires trust, particularly in individuals and institutions tasked with mediating the conflict, and without that trust conflict is nearly inevitable. Unfortunately trust is an even more scarce and fragile commodity than water, and one it starts to break down it’s hard to restore it. In his book Diamond marshalls an impressive historical range of examples of exactly what happens when key resources – such as water – start to become scarce, degraded or disappear entirely.
Barnaby seems to have focused her attention on “wars” in the twentieth-century sense of countries throwing armies at each other, which as we all know is a wholly inaccurate description of wars in general. In that limited sense, she’s correct to point out that nobody has yet gone to war explicitly in the name of water – but then nobody has yet gone to war explicitly in the name of oil, and I don’t think anybody doubts that oil has been a key driver in (cough cough) some recent conflicts.
Barnaby couldn’t find enough material to write a book about water wars, but perhaps she should have looked more closely at national and communal tensions where water supply may be a key driver in an admittedly complex set of environmental problems. She could start with, oh, I don’t know, Darfur?1
- Although note that the UN’s position on the role of climate in the conflict is felt by some to be overstated, I tend to agree with Thomas Homer-Dixon’s views on climate and conflict. [↩]