Yet another world leader is predicting impending water wars. Today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, “Our experiences tell us that environmental stress due to lack of water may lead to conflict, and it will be greater in poor nations.” Agreed. Water stress may lead to conflict, but a historical analysis shows that it is actually more likely lead to a cooperative outcome than a conflictive one. (For a quick summary of water conflict and cooperation and how water can be a force for peace rather than war, see ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko’s co-authored piece on the subject, “Water Can Be a Pathway to Peace, Not War.”)

This article from the Population Reference Bureau provides an overview of Kenya’s demography—including population growth, HIV/AIDS prevalence, and the country’s youth bulge—in the context of the ongoing ethnic conflict.

“Weather of Mass Destruction? The rise of climate change as the “new” security issue,” by past Wilson Center speaker Oli Brown, examines the risks and opportunities associated with the growing acceptance of climate change as a national and international security issue.

The United States should expand its civilian tools of international power, argued Wilson Center President Lee H. Hamilton in “Wielding our power smartly,” a January 14 editorial in The Indianapolis Star. “America’s crucial role in a complicated world demands that we apply effectively all the tools of U.S. power—public and private, military, economic and political. Our challenge is to cultivate an international system that puts cooperation and engagement at its core,” said Hamilton.

A publication from the U.S. Institute of Peace lays out guidelines for relations between U.S. armed forces and non-governmental humanitarian organizations in conflict zones or potentially hostile areas.

President George W. Bush signed an exemption that the U.S. Navy hopes will increase the likelihood that the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will vacate a federal judge’s recent injunction that the Navy take additional steps to protect marine mammals from the sonar it uses during anti-submarine warfare training.

A report by Filipino TV journalist Melclaire R. Sy-Delfin—recent Global Media Award winner and subject of an ECSP podcast—warns that a water crisis could threaten the 88 million residents of the Philippines as early as 2010. According to Delfin, 27 percent of Filipinos still lack access to drinking water, despite successful government programs to increase supply.

U.S. President George W. Bush signed a $550 billion appropriations bill into law on December 20, 2007, which included $300 million to improve water and sanitation in the developing world under the Senator Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act. Inter Press Service investigates the dangers of fetching water in Malawi, which include crocodiles and cholera.

On December 26, 2007, the Chinese government issued “Energy Conditions and Policies,” a white paper outlining the country’s energy use and plans. The government maintains that China’s history of greenhouse gas emissions gives it the right to grow its economy on fossil fuels, as did most of today’s developed countries, but also pledges China’s strong commitment to renewable energy sources.

Pope Benedict XVI called for better environmental stewardship in his Christmas homily this year, delivered during the traditional Midnight Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. According to The New York Times, “He expanded on the theme [of environmental protection] briefly by saying that an 11th-century theologian, Anselm of Canterbury, had spoken ‘in an almost prophetic way’ as he ‘described a vision of what we witness today as a polluted world whose future is at risk.’”

Along with other experts, Fred Meyerson, a professor of demography, ecology, and environmental policy at the University of Rhode Island—and a former Wilson Center Public Policy Scholar—is currently participating in an online discussion of population and climate change for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit organization that focuses on nuclear proliferation and other global security threats.

The World Bank recently released a Poverty Assessment Report for Yemen, which it produced with assistance from the UN Development Programme and the government of Yemen. IRIN News summarizes the findings.

Climate change could increase instability in the Middle East, says “Climate Change: A New Threat to Middle East Security,” a new report by Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME). Written in preparation for this month’s UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, the report focuses on how climate change could harm the region’s already-scarce water supply. Climate change’s likely impacts on water in the Middle East include reduced precipitation and resulting water shortages; more frequent extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods; and rising sea levels.

During a recent trip to Costa Rica, ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko visited Alexander Lopez, director of the School for International Affairs at the National University of Costa Rica. With his extensive field work, Lopez is an expert on the linkages between environment and conflict, as well as the management of transboundary river basins in Latin America. In the following podcast, Lopez discusses the growing awareness of environment and security linkages in Central America and his current work on building regional cooperation and integration of natural resource management.

“The water crisis in Central Asia is due to the way water has been allocated and managed; it is not a crisis of quantity but of distribution,” asserts Jeremy Allouche, a visiting fellow at the MIT Center for International Studies, in “The governance of Central Asian waters: national interests versus regional cooperation,” available in the latest issue of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research’s Disarmament Forum.

The shrinking of the Aral Sea, which began in the 1960s, first drew international attention to the region’s water issues. The Aral Sea has been an ecological disaster, but Central Asia now has another, equally serious hydrological problem: how to divide the region’s limited water among competing countries that need it for irrigation, hydropower, and other uses. Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Krygystan have had largely hostile relations over water distribution since they achieved independence in 1992, and these tensions could boil over into violent conflict unless the countries can implement a functional regional water agreement.

Allouche offers a concise, lucid overview of the challenges of the region’s post-independence water governance system, including analyses of how the water policies of Central Asia’s major players (which also include Afghanistan, China, and Russia) affect regional tensions over water.

Egyptians took to the streets to protest water shortages this summer, reports Inter Press Service (IPS), but despite widespread domestic press coverage of the groundbreaking protests and repeated assurances from Egyptian government officials, Egypt seems to have made little progress in resolving its water shortage problems. Even after President Hosni Mubarak and his cabinet announced a plan to invest $180 million in the construction of small water purification centers in areas susceptible to shortages, popular protests began or continued in multiple provinces. Mohamed Nagi, head of the Habi Centre for Environmental Rights in Cairo, told IPS, “The recent demonstrations show that citizens have lost faith in longstanding government promises to provide them with adequate drinking water.”

Indeed, as the University of Maryland’s Ken Conca points out in “The New Face of Water Conflict,” “Amid the talk of looming ‘water wars,’ a less dramatic—but more immediate—link between water and violence is often ignored: the violence engendered by poor governance of water resources.” The IPS article seems to confirm Conca’s assertion that how well water is managed can be as important as how much water is available. According to Nagi, Egypt’s water infrastructure is chronically underfunded and mismanaged. The article also notes that a study by Egypt’s state-run National Research Centre found that 85 percent of Egypt’s total potable water was wasted due to the poor condition of water distribution systems.

Egypt faces persistent water shortages despite the fact that it and Sudan hold absolute rights to use 100 percent of the Nile’s water under agreements signed in 1929 and 1959. The other countries that depend on the Nile—Burundi, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—are poorer and less powerful than Egypt, so their access to water is even more precarious than Egypt’s. For one scholar’s vision of how the 10 countries of the Nile River basin could cooperate around shared water management, see Patricia Kameri-Mbote’s “Water, Conflict, and Cooperation: Lessons from the Nile River Basin.” Kameri-Mbote believes that the combined efforts of local and national civil society groups and the Nile Basin Initiative, a high-level forum that brings together ministers from the Nile basin countries, could lead to more stable, sustainable, and equitable use of the Nile’s water.