Afrasianet - Mexican farmers set fire to government buildings, ambushed soldiers, held politicians hostage, and seized the La Buquila dam to prevent water from being diverted from their drought-ravaged fields and channeled away to the United States. One protest leader asserted : "This is a war for survival... to feed my family." National Guard troops opened fire, killing one person. In western France, saboteurs ripped off groundwater pipes, and activists armed with improvised explosives repeatedly clashed with police. Hundreds were injured in mass demonstrations opposing irrigation projects that reportedly favour industrial producers over small farmers. In Cameroon , clashes between Mosgum fishermen's communities and ethnic Arab Choa herders over access to water points have led to dozens of deaths. Thousands of refugees have fled across the Chari River to neighbouring Chad.
Water-related conflicts are increasing around the world. Why are water tensions increasing? What forms of water conflicts arise? How can they be prevented?
Escalating water conflict
The Pacific Institute, a California-based think tank, maintains the most comprehensive database available to track the global chain of violence. The "chronology of water conflicts" now documents more than 1,900 cases of armed violence linked to water resources and networks, dating back to ancient times. Nearly 90% of all registries have occurred since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Incidents of conflict around the world have seen a significant rise in recent years. The period 2012-2021 saw almost four times more conflicts than in 2000-2011. In 2023, violent incidents increased by 50% compared to 2022, while 2022 saw almost double the number of conflict cases compared to the previous year.
International disputes over water have been particularly exacerbated. During most of the twentieth century, water cooperation between states greatly outweighed differences. Researchers at Oregon State University, through their research in the archives of international relations, identified more than 2,500 water-related interstate events between 1948 and 2008. They discovered that cooperative international interactions outperformed conflicts by two to one. But this trend no longer seems to exist. A new dataset, analyzing through 2019, reveals that the balance of conflict and cooperation has changed over the past two decades. Since 2017, transboundary water conflicts have exceeded international cooperation.
This rising tide of violence reflects, in large part, the heavy toll of twenty-first-century wars. Often, wars make water a deliberate tool or a collateral victim of conflict. From the grinding civil conflicts in Iraq and Syria, belligerents have deliberately targeted water resources, seizing or destroying water networks as leverage against their opponents. Similarly, Israel's waging war on Hamas has seriously damaged water resources, degraded ecosystems, and destroyed water infrastructure, endangering public health and well-being in Gaza.
Water as a catalyst for conflict
While water is often used as a weapon or a victim of war, it is also increasingly a contributing factor to conflict, with competing users claiming vital resources. Rising water demand, mounting environmental pressures, and unsustainable management practices are putting pressure on global water supplies. The OECD predicts that the global water withdrawal rate will increase by 55% by 2050 compared to 2000 levels, driven by the growing needs of industry, energy production and domestic use. The United Nations estimates that global agricultural production will need a 50 percent increase by mid-century to feed a growing population, requiring 30 percent more water withdrawal than it is today. However, many major river basins and aquifers have reached or exceeded the limits of their renewable resources. A recent global assessment found that 2-3 billion people live in areas where total net water withdrawals exceed locally available renewable supplies for up to half the year. For half a billion people, net demand exceeds supply throughout the year. The increasing frequency and severity of floods , droughts and water-related extreme weather events exacerbate societal vulnerabilities and water security risks.
Many observers fear that these figures portend devastating conflicts between growing water needs and available water supplies. When different countries or communities rely on the same water sources, the lack between growing demand and decreasing availability can provoke intense competition or even a violent struggle to secure scarce resources. However, few analysts argue that water stress or environmental shocks directly cause conflict. Rather, a combination of indirect factors, such as the weight of the sectors adopted The water economy and the presence and distribution of adaptive capacities, shape the nature and extent of impacts on society. Water stresses interact with contextual factors such as power imbalances, ineffective governance, and economic inequalities, leading to a combination of conditions that may trigger conflict.
Defining the trajectories of the water conflict
Water conflicts can arise from different combinations of contributing factors that form distinct causal pathways . Clarifying the specific actors, mechanisms, and contexts involved in different types of water conflicts would enhance our understanding of how specific water-related security risks arise and evolve.
The United Nations defines water security as:
"the ability of populations to ensure sustainable access to adequate quantities of water of acceptable quality to support livelihoods, human well-being and socio-economic development, to ensure protection from waterborne pollution and water-related disasters, and to maintain ecosystems in a climate of peace and political stability."
Water conflicts can take forms and follow dynamics that encompass any of the constituent elements of water security – access to water;
• Environmental pressures on shared water resources: Changing rainfall patterns, changes in melting snow and ice, or saltwater intrusion into aquifers can alter or disrupt the quantity, quality, or timing of available water resources, potentially generating or exacerbating competition among competing water users. Across the Sahel, drought and lack of rainfall have led tochanged the range and conditions of growing crops and grasses, prompting semi-nomadic pasture pastoralists to graze their livestock on sedentary farmers' land. Local confrontations between farmers and herdersover land tenure, land use rights, and access to water sources periodically escalate into violent sectarian conflicts that could threaten wider destabilization .
• Changing user requirements: Significant changes in the size, location, timing, or nature of water use—or claims from new users—can strain available renewable resources, raising tensions among consumers. The intensification of oil exploitation in Nigeria's coastal Niger River Delta has significantly degraded the region's water quality, poisoning streams, groundwater, fisheries and fields. Ethnic rebel groups denounceregularly polluted the Delta, considering this one of the reasons for its attacks on the operations of international oil companies and its violence against the state.
• Water disasters: Floods, droughts and water-related disasters endanger lives and livelihoods. They can cause severe economic damage, population displacement, and social distress. When government responses to disasters prove inadequate or inequitable (or perceived as such), a state's failure to ensure public welfare can undermine social cohesion and fuel the risks of armed conflict. In 1970, Cyclone Bhola devastated the area then known as East Pakistan. Nearly half a million people died. The weak and discriminatory response by the central government in western Pakistan has fueled opposition in the east, helping to ignite a separatist crisis that culminated in the bloody civil war that led to Bangladesh's independence.
• Construction and operation of infrastructure on a shared watercourse: The construction and operation of infrastructure, such as hydroelectric dams and irrigation projects, can affect downstream water flows, affecting other water uses and users along the river. Since the seventies, Turkey, located upper-river, has developed massive infrastructure programs in the Tigris and Euphrates basin. Blaming Turkish dams for the reduced water supply, Syria, located downstream, supported the PKK rebellion against Ankara as a proxy armed force to counter Turkey's alleged manipulation of the flow of the Euphrates River, leading to a series of military confrontations over the following decades.
• Provision of water services: The capacity of civil authorities to provide water and sanitation services is a cornerstone of the state's "legitimacy" performance. The government's failure to provide this public service (on acceptable terms) could provoke popular discontent. In 1999, Bolivia privatized the Municipal Water Company in the city of Cochabamba. Fearing the confiscation of public water systems and the abolition of customary water rights, residents and farmers launched a wave of strikes and blockades. Bolivia's "water wars" saw the government declare a state of siege before eventually returning the facility to public administration.
• Confiscation of resources and access to decision-making: In many places, water rights and decision-making processes may be clearly defined, excluded, or arbitrarily controlled. State or economic elites may implement infrastructure projects, implement administrative policies, or confiscate water resources or utilities without effective participation or consultation from stakeholders. In India, Maoist insurgents, known as "Naxalists," are active throughout the central and eastern states of the country. These depend, and they are mostly of subsistence farmers and landless workers, on collectively owned land and water to meet their livelihood needs. Indian government analyses have concluded that development-induced displacement and the systematic dispossession of vulnerable populations from common property resources fuel the insurgency.
• Water and boundary disputes: Water bodies are often used to demarcate political boundaries. For example, rivers define more than one-third of international land boundaries in terms of length. Thus, changes in the shape or course of waterways may lead to territorial disputes. Stretching on the borders of Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria, Lake Chad and Nigeria has shrunk by 90% since the sixties due to reduced rainfall and increased water withdrawals from the rivers that feed it. Farmers, fishermen and herders, who follow the receding coastline across the international border, clashed with border security forces, and bloody clashes erupted over ownership of the islands emerging from the lake as the water level dropped.
• Water as a tool or target of war: Water resources and infrastructure may be targeted by parties to a violent conflict. The seizure or destruction of water sources and infrastructure may be used as a weapon of war to control territory or population. During the civil war in Iraq, ISIS took control of dams in Fallujah, Mosul, Ramadi, and elsewhere, using them to either flood or cut off water supplies to Shiite and government areas.Just as Israel took control of the Yarmouk Basin in Syria after the fall of the former Syrian regime, this is harming not only Syria but Jordan as well.
• In practice, multiple water conflict paths may interact. The development of water infrastructure may enable the expropriation of resources. Exclusionary decision-making may contribute to disaster risk. Water disputes can branch out into conflicts over arable land, productive fisheries, or other commodities on which water depends. In turn, armed conflict can degrade resource bases, erode social cohesion, and undermine coping capacities, perpetuating self-reinforcing cycles of fragility, grievance, and violence. However, water conflicts can evolve dynamically over time, oscillating between elements of cooperation and confrontation. Conflict and cooperation often coexist.
Political institutions, economic conditions, technical capacities, material resources, and social perceptions shape how societies perceive and address water resource challenges, mediating between water insecurity and conflict risks. More importantly, the dynamics of water conflict often revolve not around environmental changes and resource pressures but about governance policies and practices. Management choices related to shared resources may generate "security dilemmas." For water. Measures taken by a community to enhance its water security – such as building a dam to increase water storage capacity – may undermine the water security of others by shifting control over water resources and the nature of water risks. Similarly, the unfair distribution of water development costs and benefits and inadequate access to decision-making procedures around shared waters can be greater in generating conflict than unequal allocation or inadequate access to the material resource itself.
From swords to plows
Policymakers, from the United States and the European Union to NATO and the UN Security Council, argue that water challenges can contribute to the destabilization of key states, drive population displacement, and exacerbate social unrest in fragile states. The World Economic Forum ranksWater-related risks are among the most likely and impactful global threats in the coming decades. New risk factors are emerging. As the water crisis worsens, it is predicted that some countries in the shared river basins may use control of water supplies through dams and other infrastructure to exert influence over other riparian states. This veiled coercion by an upstream state over an estuary state may prove as fierce as overt violence.
Enhancing our understanding of the risks of water-related conflicts would contribute to highlighting the key dynamics of contemporary water security challenges. Clearly identifying the drivers of different conflict tracks also contributes to the development of "early warning" indicators of emerging risks and to the formulation of appropriate approaches to conflict reduction. Similarly, clarifying how different conflict trajectories evolve helps identify weaknesses and identify entry points needed to strengthen water governance processes and institutions to mitigate water security risks. Finally, in conflict-affected countries, clarifying different types of conflict can help formulate specific peacebuilding strategies and prevent their recurrence in post-conflict environments.