The water-energy-food nexus seems to be garnering more and more attention in the media and elsewhere, and it’s easy to see why: it’s a relatively simple way to illustrate how interconnected the world is today and the kind of domino-like effects that scarcity can have.

The original version of this article, by Manipadma Jena, appeared on Inter Press Service.

Parvez Ahmad Dar climbs three hours to reach the hilltop, generator-equipped tourist center in Ajaf village, 35 kilometers from Srinagar, to recharge his mobile phone.

The 46-year-old president of the Wular Valley People’s Welfare Forum is in high demand as an activist and organizer – he cannot allow the long power outages in northern India’s Kashmir Valley to cut off communication with his constituency.

Eight years from now, the Gaza Strip will have “virtually no reliable access to sources of safe drinking water, standards of healthcare and education will have continued to decline, and the vision of affordable and reliable electricity for all will have become a distant memory for most,” according to a United Nations report released last month. The bleak assessment concludes that without immediate action to address immense and interconnected economic, demographic, environmental, infrastructure, and social challenges facing Gazans, “the already high number of poor, marginalized and food-insecure people depending on assistance will not have changed, and in all likelihood will have increased.”

Earlier this month, there was a flurry of stories about brutal mass killings in clashes between the Pokomo and Orma communities over water and land in southeast Kenya’s Tana River County. The Kenyan media reported that about 30 people, including eight security personnel, had been killed and scores wounded, and reports on the death toll since last month are more than 100.

Following the steady economic growth that many African countries have experienced in recent years and continued population growth, urbanization has accelerated rapidly on the continent as people turn to cities to take advantage of new economic opportunities. But growing cities have led to another problem. According to a new Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report, Growing Greener Cities in Africa, urban populations are exceeding the capacity of African cities to provide food for them, putting nearly 300 million people at risk of hunger and malnutrition, and greener strategies – urban agriculture and better water use – could help considerably.

Historically, the concept of “water wars” – inter-state wars fought solely over water – has been fairly unsubstantiated. But continued population growth, accelerating development, and environmental changes are making water more scarce and in turn increasing the chances of related tensions and violence. To illustrate the growing role water plays in tensions around the world, Al Jazeera has put together a map linked to a series of stories they’ve done on water “flashpoints.”

In 1979, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat famously said that “the only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water.” Sadat’s message was clear: the Nile is a matter of national security for Egypt.

Indeed, Egypt relies on the Nile for 95 percent of its water. But it is not the only state with an interest in the world’s longest river. There are 11 states in the Nile River basin, which stretches from Africa’s Great Lakes region – Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – to the Ethiopian and Eritrean highlands through South Sudan, Sudan, and Egypt to the Mediterranean Sea.

Over the next two decades, as many as three billion people will join the middle class, even as billions more live without electricity, modern cooking fuel, and safe and reliable access to food and water. Resources are becoming more scarce and more difficult to extract, and combined with environmental factors ranging from climate change to soil erosion, those changes will make meeting middle class demand all the more difficult while leaving the world’s poorest more vulnerable to price shocks and resource shortages. In a recent report, the McKinsey Global Institute concludes that nothing less than a “step change” in how resources are managed will be required if individuals, businesses, and governments are to overcome these trends and pave the way for a more sustainable and equitable future.