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On the left, we talk about the coming water wars occasionally, but I'm not sure if people 100% understand what it meant by that, so I want to elaborate a bit. I've done some research on this in college in some of my classes such as watershed management and it's super interesting
A water war doesn't necessarily have to be fought over a global lack of water, just a regional one. The world is made up of areas called watersheds which are just areas where all of the water drains to a single pour point. Watersheds do not abide by national borders. example VVV
For a long time, there has been a water war just within the states of AL, GA, and FL over water rights within the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint basin. There has been tons of fighting over it but the good thing is that there is still enough water for all parties involved
And we also have a legal system to handle stuff like this. Different countries fighting over water right don't. This brings us to the example of China. They also recognize that water will become increasingly valuable, so they have built up a giant network of dams. some seen below
China has over 40% of the worlds dams, and this has major impacts on the amount of water that is received downstream, which in some cases happens to be in other lower Mekong countries. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mekong-river/chinese-dams-held-back-mekong-waters-during-drought-study-finds-idUSKCN21V0U7
Water is needed for nearly everything in a modern society, so upstream countries reducing the amount of water you get doesn't just mean you might have to take shorter showers. Here's a breakdown of water usage by state in the U.S. from the USGS
We can already predict where water wars will happen just from knowing hydrologic patterns and the power different countries can wield. Obviously countries in drier areas will experience the most conflict, but that doesn't mean that wet countries can't experience it as well.
Hell, lots of the lower Mekong countries mentioned above are rainforests, but their natural environment and industry both evolved with a natural flow of water that is now being cut off upstream in China. Also: source for water war locations: https://bit.ly/32gajq5
Water wars won't have to be all out wars. They can be settled with negotiation, like most other things. The actual fighting comes when a nation that more or less controls the water supply of a region of another country decides they want to keep that water and doesn't give in.
The wikipedia page for Water Conflict has some good general information too so I'll link it here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_conflict
Water wars also don't have to be waged over fresh water. There's plenty of conflict in the world of saltwater. Every country has an Exclusive Economic Zone that extends 200 nautical miles beyond their coast. Each country is supposed to have exclusive rights to .....
manage and harvest natural resources within that zone. The issue comes when that 200 nautical miles overlaps between 2 or more countries. This is a huge issue for oil, fishing, etc. Below are a couple of videos from a youtuber I like that mention EEZs.
this one mentions American EEZs
This one mentions French EEZs (particularly one where they had some beef with Canada)
Generally, the way that this is settled is by just splitting whatever area the argument is over in half, but this only works if both countries are willing to cooperate and compromise. Here is a huge area of conflict in the South China Sea
Here's a video that mentions that:
And here's something happening recently that shows some more potential conflict
I'll add more to this thread later. Time for bed
Completely forgot about this thread until now. Hopefully I don't forget to come back and keep adding more, but I'll just add this for now.
Water wars aren't *just* wars over water - the lack of access to water leads to many other problems as well.
Water wars aren't *just* wars over water - the lack of access to water leads to many other problems as well.
Let's say that an area gets cut off from a lot of their supply of water because a dam was built upstream. That area will now have higher infrastructure costs. Due to sediment being trapped by the dam, they will have to use more fertilizer on their crops, leading to excess ...
