Green Prophet: So, for context, can you say a little bit about the National Intelligence report and why it was compiled?

Geoff Dabelko: The water and security assessment from the National Intelligence Council was done at the request of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The National Intelligence Council has a strong history of looking at long term trends in the environmental, technological, demographic realms and working to understand how trends in these areas are and could be part of larger economic, political, and social dynamics that may pose national security issues for the United States.

Green Prophet: There were seven river basins of particular concern, of which four are located in the MENA region: the Euphrates, Jordan, Nile, and the Tigris. Why do you think these are of particular importance?

Geoff Dabelko: I do not explicitly know the criteria for their selection of the seven basins. But I think these four, like the other three, have some common characteristics. They are basins where the rivers are shared by two or more countries/territories that are heavily dependent on the waters; that have relations among the states that include uncertain, tense, or even overtly hostile relationships; that are now and/or likely to experience big growth in demand for the water resource based on both population growth and consumption growth, that at the same time there is concern that climate change will at least increase variability, timing, and or quantity of that water (both scarcity and abundance i.e. floods).

And then the report focuses on the institutional river basin arrangements and differentiates among their assessed capacities for addressing these current and future stresses. That diversity aside, it is fair to say that the transboundary water institutions remain a priority yet a challenge for addressing the multiple dimensions of the water relationship. I say “multiple” given all the different uses water performs in most of these settings (transport, irrigation, hydropower, culture, industrial, household, etc).

What this report instead does, is recognize that there’s been an awful lot of cooperation around water even in the face of scarcity and that that cooperation in part helps us avoid conflicts, whether they’re violent or political, and that we should invest in those institutions that help us get to cooperation.

It also suggests that it’s inadequate and incorrect to think of water as just a single-sector issue. The report is quite clear in connecting it to energy, connecting it to food, connecting it to health, economic development, agriculture obviously, and so that recognition [in] analysis sounds in some way straightforward, but unfortunately, when we organize our responses, we often respond in sector, and there’s not nearly enough communication and cooperation.

And finally, the report does say that the future may not look like the past, and so while we don’t have evidence of states fighting one another over water – and the judgment of the report is in the next 10 years, we won’t see that – it does hold out the prospect for as we go farther down the line, in terms of higher levels of consumption and higher levels of population, that we need to pay special attention because there’s some particular river basins in parts of the world where, as I said, the future may not look like the past and we have greater concerns for higher levels of conflict.