The COP26 climate summit ended after two long weeks of debate, negotiation and advocacy. Water was one of the issues that repeatedly came up in these discussions, whether it was about water-related disasters, sanitation or climate-resilient agriculture. This short article is a contribution by Dr Naho Mirumachi, King’s Water hub lead & Reader in Environmental Politics at the Department of Geography, King’s College London. It looks at how we can make sense of the links between water, climate and conflict.
How will climate change affect the future of conflict over water?
Today, there are 2.3 billion people living in water-stressed regions across the world. The future is set to be more unpredictable and with extremes of droughts and floods. Securing enough water of good quality is vital for our health and livelihoods. But water consumption continues to rise, outstripping the amount we withdraw from our rivers, lakes and groundwater aquifers. Water conflicts already exist between farmers and often take the shape of protests over the construction of dams.
Despite this, climate change will not be the singular factor associated with water conflict in the future. Instead, it will one of the many factors that contribute to struggles and strife. Climate change in and of itself will not necessarily determine the severity of violence in water conflicts or be a good predictor of where water conflicts will emerge. This is because there are multiple intersecting socio-economic and political factors such as poverty levels, class, gender, ethnicity and age that determine water access of a person.
Climate change is unlikely to cause water wars between states. In large transboundary rivers shared by multiple countries, agreements and institutions have put in place arrangements for water allocation. This option is cheaper for governments; it is too costly to go to war over water.
But this does not mean climate change does not matter. The impacts of climate change have real consequences for farmers relying on rivers drying up, women and girls spending longer to fetch water and fisherfolk needing to look for alternative livelihoods when ecosystems are broken.
At the national scale, climate adaptation and mitigation will change the political economy of water use to address national water deficits. Current solutions to relieve pressure on local water sources is to import food and take into account virtual water, or the water embedded during the production of crops. While the agricultural sector is the largest water user amounting to 72% of all water use, in the future, the focus will be about where such agricultural activity will take place.
Countries have begun to invest in water-abundant land abroad to support their national food demand. Other countries are shifting to biofuel crop production for a share of the renewable energy market. Climate change is at best an indirect and partial motivation for these investments and agricultural projects. But the consequences of these investments fall on local communities whose water use permits are curbed by big businesses securing access or farmers being pushed off lands.
Water conflicts will manifest as disputes over access to both land and water between local communities, governments and businesses. The unpredictability and extremes of water availability will require water users to find adaptable solutions in the future. The heterogeneity of water users in scale and purpose will mean that no solution fits all. There will be winners and losers. The future of water conflicts will bring into sharp focus the inequalities faced by communities, states and ecosystems.