A recent post on Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth blog—entitled “Poop is Funny, But It’s Fatal”—highlights a UNICEF World Water Day video about the necessity of destigmatizing human waste. Bacterial infections caused by contact with human waste kill 1.5 million people every year—most of them children. The stakes are high. The film uses kids and humor—two good ingredients for education through entertainment—to explain the importance of sanitation. The film emphasizes that although we may not like talking about feces, urine, toilets, and the like, we need to because the fact that 2.6 billion of us lack adequate sanitation is a fundamental threat to human health, productivity, and dignity. It’s a short film—YouTube friendly—and these are complex links, but they are key to understanding the need to invest in available technologies.

“Over the next twenty years physical pressures – population, resource, energy, climatic, and environmental – could combine with rapid social, cultural, technological, and geopolitical change to create greater uncertainty,” warns the newly released 2008 National Defense Strategy. Demographic trends, resource scarcity, and environmental change all inform the updated strategy, which encourages international cooperation to address these impending challenges.

The “Population Forum” in the September issue of WorldWatch Magazine “reveals that empowering women to make their own family size choices…is the best strategy to tackle population growth” and the environmental and security problems linked to it. A short history of population trends is available online; the website offers free previews of Lori Hunter’s article on PHE and gender, as well as “Population and Security” by Elizabeth Leahy and ECSP’s own Sean Peoples. Bernard Orimbo links population growth and environmental degradation in his native Kenya, and PAI staff discuss urbanization.

Climate change threatens to exaggerate the challenges faced by the billions of people worldwide who depend upon natural resources for their survival. But the competition and, at times, violent conflict that results from increased resource scarcity is not a given; the recently released World Resources Report 2008 finds that “well-designed, community-based enterprises” can ease the environmental burden on natural resources and pave the way for sustainable dependence on the land.

At the 2008 World Expo’s “Water and Conflict Resolution” week, municipal representatives working with Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME) presented case studies from its “Good Water Neighbors” programs: cross-border solutions for the Lower Jordan River; the Jordan River Peace Park project; and the town of Auja in the Jordan River Valley. Speaking about these programs the Wilson Center, FOEME’s Gidon Bromberg said that “by working together, not only do we advance the environmental issues…we also advance peace between our peoples.”

Food shortages and high food prices are hot topics of conversation these days, and people are scrambling to uncover the causes and improve the current situation. A recent Financial Times article and multimedia package explore the links between food, water, and land use in Egypt, which has always contended with limited water resources but in recent months has also dealt with the impacts of sharply escalating global grain prices.

The article discusses how Egypt’s crops are grown under two distinct sets of conditions: the reclaimed desert in the West Nile Delta and the fertile Nile River Valley and Delta. In the desert, water is so scarce—and therefore valuable—that farmers are encouraged to conserve as much as possible through modern methods such as drip irrigation, helping the region achieve close to a 75 percent water efficiency rate.

This water-efficient agriculture lies in severe juxtaposition to the practices employed in the water-rich Nile River Valley and Delta. Here, rice is grown using flood irrigation techniques that waste 50 percent of the water. The government is attempting to increase water-use efficiency in order to use this saved water to reclaim more desert land for the production of high-value agricultural goods such as ornamental plants and citrus.

One idea proposed to alleviate water scarcity in countries like Egypt is that of “virtual water.” Proponents of virtual water argue that because water is embedded in products that are shipped around the world—particularly food—if water-scarce regions import these products instead of producing them domestically, they can then use their limited water for productive uses besides agriculture.

The Financial Times multimedia package includes an interview with Tony Allan, a professor at King’s College London and the originator of the concept of virtual water, for which he received the 2008 Stockholm Water Prize. He argues that virtual water would be “economically invisible”—as the cost of water is included in the cost of food, which would presumably be lower when imported from a country with plentiful water—and “politically silent”—as it would spare leaders from having to contend with the political fallout from a water shortage.

Unfortunately, as Allan notes, virtual water’s potentially large benefit to water-scarce regions is largely hypothetical, as U.S. and European agricultural subsidies prevent the prices of commodities, including water, from being set at their true levels. In addition, as the rice stockpiling triggered by the recent food crisis has demonstrated, few countries are likely willing to cease domestic food production entirely and entrust the filling of their kitchen cupboards to the global economy.

With more than one billion people lacking adequate access to freshwater, the world is already experiencing a vast set of challenges. In the not-so-distant future, as the global population continues to grow and as the impacts of climate change are felt, the problem will intensify. In this month’s issue of Scientific American, Harvard professor Peter Rogers unpacks the multiple factors contributing to this scarcity and proposes six priority actions to alleviate some of this stress.

Rogers’ key message is: “If a crisis arises in the coming decades, it will not be for lack of know-how; it will come from a lack of foresight and from an unwillingness to spend the needed money.” He points out that it is the combination of climate change and continued population growth that will have a devastating affect on local water scarcity. However, water scarcity is not only driven by demand outweighing supply, but also by the pollution of our water supply and by the wasting of water by individuals, industry, and our water-supply systems.

To address these issues, Rogers proposes six priority recommendations:

1. Set higher prices for water use. In the United States and other developed countries, water is so cheap that “it seems almost free,” so there is little incentive to conserve or reuse. Increasing the price of water supply would drive conservation. For instance, municipalities would be more likely to fix leaks in water-supply systems and to invest in water reuse.
2. Improve irrigation efficiency. With approximately 70 percent of available freshwater going to agriculture, increasing the efficiency of irrigation systems—fixing leaks, creating low-loss storage capabilities, and more efficiently applying water to crops—would create a volume of water that could go to other uses.
3. Supply “virtual water.” “Virtual water” refers to the amount of water used to produce a product. If arid and semiarid areas imported more food or other water-intensive products, this import of virtual water would allow the limited water that is available to go to other uses, such as drinking water or industry. Implementing this recommendation would require the liberalization of trade in farm products and a reduction in tariffs. Given the highly contested debates about farm subsides in the United States and the EU, this seems a far-off proposition.
4. Use dry or low-water devices for sanitation. This would reduce the amount of water used for sanitation and could also reduce the use of fossil fuel-based fertilizers if the solid waste were collected and composted for farming purposes.
5. Use desalination to increase supply. Once limited by high costs and high energy demands, desalination technologies are nearing commercial viability.
6. Invest in water. Major investment in existing technologies to conserve water, maintain and replace infrastructure, and construct sanitation systems will be needed to stave off a water crisis. According to the article, Booz Allen Hamilton estimates that a $1 trillion annual investment in these sectors will be required to meet the world’s water needs through 2030.

Rogers lays out a solid set of steps to address our growing water needs, but implementing them will require leadership in the government and beyond, as well as the conscious planning and management of water resources. And while these steps are reasonable for large economies with robust governance systems, the areas of the world that are most affected by a lack of water—places where diarrhea is the leading cause of death for children under five and where women and children are required to walk miles to wells to collect drinking water—will require not only financial support, as Rogers notes, but also long-term technical and legal assistance.

I was lucky enough recently to vacation in Israel—and I still have the jet lag to prove it. On the second day of the trip, as we crossed the Jordan River and entered the Golan Heights, our guide explained that people have fought over water throughout history—especially in the Middle East. “Aha!” I thought to myself. “Another example of how the average person mistakenly believes that water scarcity leads to conflict—whereas, as an Environmental Change and Security Program staff member, I know that interstate ‘water wars’ are actually incredibly rare.”

Yet our guide proceeded to describe several water-related conflicts between Israel and its neighbors before and after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. So when I returned to the States, I was inspired to look up these events in the Pacific Institute’s Water Conflict Chronology and in Oregon State University’s Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database. I found that Israel and its neighbors were frequently engaged in violent conflict with one another over water during the 1960s and early 1970s. For instance, after Syria began diverting the headwaters of the Jordan River in 1965—a project that would have deprived Israel’s National Water Carrier of approximately 35 percent of its water and the country as a whole of around 11 percent of its water—Israel responded with a series of military strikes against the diversion works. The back-and-forth attacks helped instigate the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

Another example: In 1969, Israel, which believed that Jordan was overdiverting the Yarmouk River, bombed Jordan’s East Ghor Canal. The United States mediated secret negotiations in 1969-1970, and the Jordanians were allowed to repair the canal in exchange for abiding by Johnston Plan water quotas and expelling the Palestinian Liberation Organization from Jordan.

So how do we explain the apparent disconnect between the numerous instances of violent conflict over water in the Middle East and political scientists’ insistence that water rarely leads to interstate conflict? I think the answer is twofold. First, I happened to be standing in the region of the world that is by far the most prone to conflict over water. There were only 37 violent interactions over water between 1946 and 1999, and 30 of these were between Israel and a neighbor. Water experts recognize that the Middle East is the exception to the general pattern of water disputes leading to cooperation, not conflict. But to Middle Easterners like my Israeli guide, it may indeed seem that water frequently leads to conflict.

Second, the devil is in the definitions. The Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database classifies events according to its Water Event Intensity Scale, which runs from -7 (“formal declaration of war”) to 7 (“voluntary unification into one nation”). The East Ghor incident is classified as -6 (“extensive war acts causing deaths, dislocation or high strategic cost”). Events classified as -6 can include “use of nuclear weapons; full scale air, naval, or land battles; invasion of territory; occupation of territory; massive bombing of civilian areas; capturing of soldiers in battle; large scale bombing of military installations; [and] chemical or biological warfare,” so they seem to differ from war only in that war has not been formally declared.

Perhaps this is where much of the confusion comes from: Political scientists studying water conflict use a very narrow definition of war—probably a lot narrower than that of most non-experts. So while the average interested citizen would likely call the 1965-1967 conflict between Israel and Syria over the National Water Carrier and the Headwater Diversion project a war—or at least a high-level interstate conflict—the political scientist studying water conflict and cooperation would not.

Now, as a general principle, I’m all in favor of precise language and definitions. But formal declarations of war seem to have gone out of fashion over the past half century; the United States, for instance, has not formally declared war against another country since World War II. If the current war in Afghanistan were over water—which it decidedly is not—would it still merit only a -6 on the Water Event Intensity Scale because the United States has not formally declared war against the Taliban? It seems that requiring a formal declaration of war to classify a conflict as a war is perhaps defining the term too narrowly.

But although political scientists may be to blame for clinging to a somewhat outdated definition of war, the media are perhaps at fault for using the word too broadly in an attempt to make their headlines more enticing. This editor concludes—only somewhat self-servingly—that we would all benefit from using language more precisely. I welcome your responses.

Photo: The Golan Heights landscape still bears scars from the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Courtesy of Rachel Weisshaar.

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“If you want fast money and are willing to take the risk, that’s the only way to get it,” says Abdullah Dieng, a fisherman in Bissau, Guinea, in a new IRIN article, “Fishermen turn to trafficking as fish profits drop.” Fishermen in Guinea have a problem: No one is buying their fish. “The lack of decent roads into the interior of the country, combined with prohibitive fuel prices, makes it too difficult for fish-sellers to transport fish any further than Bissau, creating a saturated market,” reports IRIN. As an alternative, the fishermen are turning to illegal trade in drugs and humans. By smuggling, they can earn much more money.

“The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates several hundred kilograms of cocaine go through the country each week, while according to 2004 figures from the International Office of Migration, one million West and Central Africans head clandestinely to Europe every year,” reports IRIN.

Fisheries are collapsing all over the world, but especially in Africa. The New York Times article “Europe Takes Africa’s Fish, and Boatloads of Migrants Follow” reports that there is almost no regulation of Bissau’s fishery, like most fisheries along the African coast. “Creating the Enabling Environment for Effective Fisheries Enforcement,” an event in the Environmental Change and Security Program’s fisheries series, explored some of the challenges associated with fisheries management. One of the most basic problems is a lack of information. Vladimir Kacyznski, a marine scientist with the University of Washington, told the Times that “no one has comprehensively studied the nation’s coastal waters for at least 20 years.” As a result, both local and European fishers have mostly stripped the area of its fish.

The lack of oversight is largely due to a lack of attention, and thus a lack of money. IRIN reports that “The fishing ministry receives just 5 percent of the government’s paltry annual budget, despite fishing bringing in 40 percent of the country’s annual revenues, and most of this money can only cover staff salaries.” Without increased funding and attention, it is unlikely that a solution will emerge to the environmental and economic problems that force fishermen to turn to illegal and dangerous activities. As the source of their livelihoods disappears, they have fewer and fewer options. Said one consultant quoted in the Times story, “The sea is being emptied.”

“Women are key to the development challenge,” says Strategies for Promoting Gender Equity in Developing Countries, but “gender mainstreaming has been associated with more failures than gains.” Detailing findings from an April 2007 conference co-sponsored by the Wilson Center and the Inter-American Foundation, the report calls for a redesigned approach operating on multiple fronts. Blogging about the report, About.com’s Linda Lowen dubs the gap between women and men in developing countries a “Grand Canyon-like divide” compared to the “crack in the sidewalk” faced by Western women.

A Council on Foreign Relations backgrounder on Angola—now Africa’s leading oil producer—tackles the familiar paradox of extreme poverty in resource-rich countries. Burdened by “an opaque financial system rife with corruption,” Angola’s leaky coffers are filling up with Chinese currency. As Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos put it, “China needs natural resources, and Angola wants development.” FastCompany.com’s “Special Report: China In Africa” criticizes the overwhelming Chinese presence in Africa: “The sub-Sahara is now the scene of one of the most sweeping, bare-knuckled, and ingenious resource grabs the world has ever seen.”

In Scientific American’s “Facing the Freshwater Crisis,” Peter Rogers writes that the demands of increasing population, along with increasingly frequent droughts due to climate change, signal rough waters ahead, and calls for major infrastructure investments to prevent catastrophe. Closer to home, Circle of Blue reports on a new era of water scarcity in the United States, and director Jim Thebaut’s documentary “Running Dry: The American Southwest” takes a look at the hard-hit region.

Pastoralists are socially marginalized in many countries, making them highly vulnerable to climate change despite their well-developed ability to adapt to changing conditions, reports the International Institute for Environment and Development in “Browsing on fences: Pastoral land rights, livelihoods and adaptation to climate change.” The paper notes that the “high rate of development intervention failure” has worsened the situation, and calls for giving pastoralists “a wider range of resources, agro-ecological as well as socio-economic,” to protect them.

“Over the past two decades, the extraction and trade of natural resources have helped incite, fuel and prolong violent conflicts,” write Alec Crawford and Oli Brown in Growing Unrest: The links between farmed and fished resources and the risk of conflict, a new report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development. “The links between natural resources and conflict are established and widely accepted,” point out the authors; however, “it has become ‘received wisdom’ that these linkages only apply to a certain subset of natural resources—oil, diamonds, certain minerals (e.g., coltan), illegal narcotics and timber.” This notion is mistaken, as agriculture and fisheries are also often involved in funding and instigating conflict.

The authors highlight four case studies before making general policy recommendations. In the Côte d’Ivoire, instabilities in the cocoa market during the 1980s exacerbated social tensions, eventually leading to civil war. During this war, both sides taxed cocoa transport or production to finance their war effort.

In Somalia, where limited ports make it easy to control exports, a tax on bananas was a significant source of income for many Somali warlords during the 1990s. In present-day Somalia, many warlords have turned to the fishing market, funding local militias by issuing false fishing licenses to foreign companies for millions of dollars.

The final case examines the tensions over water-sharing agreements in Central Asia between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Water necessary for irrigating cotton, the local economic staple, has been a contentious issue for years, and resolution has not been forthcoming even as irrigation infrastructure continues to decay.

Based on these case studies, the authors report three main findings:

• By controlling the trade of agricultural or marine commodities, gangs, warlords, or sovereign nations can extract wealth and use it to support conflicts and other oppressive activities.
• When the prices of farmed and fished goods are volatile, they can lead to instability and conflict in nations without stable markets or political systems.
• Agricultural and marine goods can be seen as “proxies” for more basic commodities, such as freshwater and land — and thus part of larger conflicts over those resources.

The report offers 14 recommendations — falling into two general categories — for policymakers hoping to minimize conflict over these resources. It recommends expanding existing structures – such as extending sanctions that currently punish those who use diamonds, oil, coltan, and other natural resources to fund conflict – to include agricultural and marine commodities. It also recommends stabilizing dangerous situations, such as easing institutional tensions when faced with shortages or conflicting interests, or cracking down on opportunities for exploitation caused by price volatility.

Those interested in natural resources and conflict should expand their focus to fished and farmed resources instead of remaining trapped in a worldview in which only certain commodities are important. The authors write, “It is not the type of resource that matters, but rather how it is produced and traded, to what ends the revenues are put, and what the associated impact is on people and their environments.”

ECSP examined the challenges facing the world’s fisheries in a recent meeting series available at www.wilsoncenter.org/fish. An ongoing series looks at natural resources and conflict: www.wilsoncenter.org/newhorizons.