What Causes Water Conflict

Commentary by David Michel

Published November 8, 2024

Mexican farmers set fire to government buildings, ambushed soldiers, took politicians hostage, and seized control of La Boquilla dam to prevent water from being diverted from their drought-parched fields and funneled away to the United States. "This is a war to survive . . . to feed my family," affirmed a protest leader. National Guard troops opened fire, killing one. In western France, saboteurs uprooted underground water pipes and activists armed with improvised explosives repeatedly battled police. Hundreds have been injured in massive demonstrations opposing irrigation projects said to favor industrial producers over small farmers. In Cameroon, clashes pitting Musgum fisher communities against ethnic Arab Choa herders over access to water points left dozens dead. Thousands of refugees have fled across the Chari River into neighboring Chad.

Water-related conflicts are increasing worldwide. Why are water tensions growing? What forms do emerging water conflicts take? And how can they be prevented?

A Rising Tide of Water Conflict

The Pacific Institute, a California-based think tank, maintains the most comprehensive available database tracking the global litany of violence. The Water Conflict Chronology now catalogs over 1900 instances of armed violence associated with water resources and water systems, dating back to antiquity. Nearly 90 percent of all recorded entries have occurred since the start of the twenty-first century. Conflict events around the world have risen markedly in recent years. The period 2012-2021 witnessed roughly four times more conflicts than the years 2000-2011. In 2023, violent incidents soared 50 percent over the number in 2022, while 2022 had endured almost twice as many conflict cases as the year before.

Image courtesy of the Pacific Institute, from the Fact Sheet: Water Conflict Chronology Update (August 22, 2024), used with permission.

International water conflict in particular has surged. For most of the twentieth century, water collaboration between states substantially outweighed discord. Scholars at Oregon State University, combing through the archives of international relations, identified over 2,500 interstate events concerning water between 1948 and 2008. Cooperative international interactions, they discovered, outnumbered conflicts two to one. But this trend no longer seems to hold. A new dataset carrying the analysis up to 2019 reveals the conflict-cooperation balance has shifted over the past two decades. Since 2017, transboundary water clashes have overtaken acts of international collaboration.

Much of this rising tide of violence reflects the grim toll of twenty-first-century warfare. All too often, wars make water a deliberate tool or a collateral casualty of conflict. From the grinding civil strife in Iraq and Syria to Russia's assault on Ukraine, combatants have purposely targeted water resources, seizing or destroying water systems as leverage against their adversaries. Similarly, Israel's prosecution of the war on Hamas and Russia's brutal invasion have severely compromised water sources, degraded ecosystems, and decimated water infrastructure, imperiling public health and welfare in Gaza and Ukraine.

Water as a Conflict Catalyst

While water frequently figures as a weapon or victim of war, it also increasingly constitutes a contributing trigger of conflict as competing users assert their claims to vital resources. Rising water demands, escalating environmental pressures, and unsustainable management practices increasingly strain global water supplies. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development projects that global water withdrawals will climb 55 percent by 2050 from 2000 levels, propelled by mounting needs for industry, energy production, and domestic use. The United Nations calculates world agricultural production will have to ramp up 50 percent by mid-century to feed a growing population, requiring water withdrawals 30 percent higher than today. Yet many major river basins and groundwater aquifers have reached or surpassed the limits of their renewable resources. One recent global assessment found that 2-3 billion people live in regions where total net water withdrawals outstrip locally available renewable supplies for up to half the year. For half a billion people, net demand outpaces supply all year round. The increasing frequency and severity of floods, droughts, and water-related extreme weather events further aggravate societal vulnerabilities and water security risks.

Many observers fear such figures could portend potentially wrenching collisions between growing water needs and available water supplies. Where different countries or communities rely on the same water sources, shortfalls between rising demands and diminishing availability could provoke sharpened competition or even violent conflict to secure scarce resources. Few analysts, though, argue that water stress or environmental shocks directly cause conflict. Rather, a range of indirect factors, such as the weight of water-dependent sectors in the economy and the presence and distribution of coping capacities shape the nature and extent of the impacts on society. Water stresses interact with contextual elements such as power asymmetries, ineffective governance, and economic inequalities to create combinations of circumstances that may catalyze conflict.

Identifying Water Conflict Pathways

Water conflicts can arise from different combinations of contributing factors forming distinct causal pathways. Clarifying the specific actors, mechanisms, and contexts involved in different types of water conflicts can enhance our understanding of how particular water-related security risks can arise and unfold.

The United Nations defines water security as:

"The capacity of a population to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities of acceptable quality water for sustaining livelihoods, human well-being, and socio-economic development, for ensuring protection against water-borne pollution and water-related disasters, and for preserving ecosystems in a climate of peace and political stability."

Water conflicts may take forms and follow dynamics implicating any of the constituent elements of water security-water access; available water quantity or quality; livelihoods and development; water-related disasters; and political processes.

Environmental pressures on shared water resources: Varying precipitation patterns, changes in snow and ice melt, or saline intrusion into groundwater aquifers can alter or disrupt the quantity, quality, or timing of available water resources, potentially engendering or exacerbating competition between contending water users. Across the Sahel, droughts and diminished rainfall have shifted the range and growing conditions for crops and grasses, pushing seminomadic herders seeking pasture to graze their livestock onto the lands of sedentary farmers. Local farmer-herder confrontations over land tenure, use rights, and access to watering points periodically escalate into violent intercommunal clashes that may threaten broader instability.

Changing user demands: Significant changes in the size, location, timing, or nature of water use-or claims from new users-can strain available renewable resources, creating tensions between consumers. Intensifying petroleum exploitation in Nigeria's coastal Niger River Delta dramatically degraded the region's water quality, poisoning streams, groundwater, fisheries, and fields. Ethnic rebel groups regularly decry the Delta's contamination among the reasons for their attacks on international oil company operations and violence against the state.

Water disasters: Floods, droughts, and water-related catastrophes imperil lives and livelihoods. They can drive significant economic damage, population displacements, and social distress. Where government disaster responses prove inadequate or inequitable (or are perceived so), the state's failure to ensure public welfare can erode social cohesion and stoke armed conflict risks. In 1970 Cyclone Bhola devastated the territory then known as East Pakistan. Perhaps half a million people perished. The feeble and discriminatory response by the central government in West Pakistan galvanized dissidence in the East, helping trigger a secessionist crisis that culminated in the bloody civil war that created independent Bangladesh.

Construction and operation of Infrastructure on a shared waterway: Building and operating infrastructure such as hydropower dams and irrigation schemes can impact water flows downstream, affecting other water uses and users up and down the river. Since the 1970s, upstream Turkey has developed massive infrastructure programs in the Tigris-Euphrates Basin. Blaming Turkish dams for decreasing water supplies, downstream Syria supported the Kurdistan Workers Party insurgency against Ankara as an armed proxy to counter Turkey's alleged manipulations of the Euphrates River's flow, precipitating serial military showdowns over the ensuing decades.

Water services provision: The ability of civil authorities to furnish water and sanitation services constitutes an important building block of state "performance legitimacy." Government failure to supply this public good (on acceptable terms) can spur popular discontent. In 1999, Bolivia privatized the municipal water company in the city of Cochabamba. Fearing expropriation of their communal water systems and abrogation 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 ultimately returning the utility to public management.

Resource expropriation and access to decisionmaking: In many places, water rights and decisionmaking processes can be ill-defined, exclusionary, or subject to arbitrary control. Government or economic elites may undertake infrastructure projects, implement management policies, or expropriate water resources or benefits without the effective participation or consultation of relevant stakeholders. In India, Maoist rebels known as "Naxalites" operate across the country's central and eastern states. Largely subsistence farmers and landless laborers, they depend on collectively held land and waters for their survival needs. Indian government analyses have concluded that development-induced displacement and systematic dispossession of vulnerable populations from common property resources are fueling the insurgency.

Water and border disputes: Water bodies are often used to demarcate political boundaries. Rivers, for example, define over one-third of international land borders by length. Consequently, changes in the shape or course of waterways can spawn territorial disputes. Straddling the frontiers of Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria, Lake Chad has shrunk 90 percent since the 1960s due to decreasing rainfall and increasing water withdrawals from rivers feeding into it. Farmers, fishers, and herders following the receding shoreline across international borderlines have clashed with border security forces, and deadly confrontations have erupted over the ownership of islands emerging from the lake as water levels fall.

Water as a tool or target of war: Water resources and infrastructure may be targeted by parties to violent conflict. Capture or destruction of water sources and infrastructure may be used as weapons of war to control territory or populations. During the civil war in Iraq, ISIS seized control of dams in Fallujah, Mosul, Ramadi, and elsewhere and used them to either flood or cut off water supplies to Shiite and government-held areas.

In practice, multiple water conflict pathways may interact. The development of water infrastructure may enable resource expropriation. Exclusionary decisionmaking may contribute to disaster risks. Water disputes may ramify into clashes over arable land, productive fisheries, or other goods that water sustains. Armed conflicts can in turn degrade resource bases, erode social cohesion, and undermine coping capacities, perpetuating self-reinforcing cycles of fragility, grievance, and violence. Yet water conflicts can evolve dynamically over time, oscillating between elements of collaboration and confrontation. Conflict and cooperation can and do often coexist.

Political institutions, economic conditions, technical capacities, material resources, and social perceptions shape how communities apprehend and address water resource challenges, mediating between water insecurity and conflict risks. Importantly, water conflict dynamics frequently revolve not around environmental changes and resource pressures but around governance policies and practices. Management choices about shared resources may engender water "security dilemmas." Measures taken by one community to enhance its own water security-constructing a dam to increase water storage capacity, for instance-may undermine the water security of others by shifting the control of water resources and the nature of water risks. Likewise, inequitable allocation of the costs and benefits of water development and inadequate access to decisionmaking procedures around shared waters can loom larger in generating conflict than unequal allocation or inadequate access to the physical resource itself.

From Swords to Ploughshares

Policymakers from the United States and the European Union to NATO and the UN Security Council consider that water challenges could contribute to destabilizing key countries, drive population displacements, aggravate social disruptions in fragile states, and endanger global peace and prosperity. The World Economic Forum regularly ranks water-related risks among the most likely and most impactful global threats of the coming decades. And new risk factors are emerging. As water stresses grow more acute, the U.S. Intelligence Community envisages some states in shared basins may use the control of water supplies via dams and other infrastructure to exercise leverage over other riparian countries. Such veiled coercion by an upstream power of a downstream neighbor could prove as disruptive as overt violence.

Strengthening our understanding of water-related conflict risk can help illuminate the key dynamics of contemporary water security challenges. Clearly specifying the drivers of different conflict pathways can contribute to developing "early warning" indicators for emerging risks and to formulating appropriate conflict reduction approaches. Similarly, elucidating how distinct conflict pathways may unfold can help target vulnerabilities and pinpoint entryways for bolstering water governance processes and institutions to mitigate water security risks. Finally, in conflict-affected countries, clarifying different conflict types can help craft targeted peacebuilding strategies and prevent conflict recurrence in post-conflict environments.

David Michel is the senior fellow for water security with the Global Food and Water Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

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