Troubled Waters: Climate Change, Hydropolitics, and Transboundary Resources, a recent report by the Stimson Center’s “Regional Voices: Transnational Challenges” project, exemplifies the kind of integrated analysis that needs to be done on global security, governance, and environmental issues. I want to highlight four areas where the report points us in the right direction for this kind of work:

1. It takes a regional approach. Regions have historically been neglected as units of analysis, and there has not been enough focus on regional institutions. We organize our foreign assistance on an overwhelmingly bilateral basis; we have country strategies and spend much of our money bilaterally. Yet river basins or other ecosystems are almost always transboundary and therefore regional. The chapters in this report show time and again that bilateral approaches are not sufficient to meet the challenges posed by climate change’s impacts on the hydrological cycle.

2. It examines what climate change means in specific contexts. In year of Copenhagen, we need to be talking about global targets and timetables, grand bargains, and massive mitigation. But we must keep a parallel focus on what climate change will mean in specific sectors (e.g., water, food, desertification), in specific locations, and for specific groups (e.g., the poor).

The report has many examples of where glacial and snowmelt patterns have big impacts many hundreds and thousands of miles away. My own program just hosted a conference in Bangkok where we had the India-based expert on glacial melt in the Tibetan plateau talking with USAID environment officers in Southeast Asia. We need more of these kinds of conversations.

3. It takes a holistic, integrated approach toward analyzing problems and recommending responses. This report makes explicit the importance of the analytical and policy connections among climate change, water, governance, conflict, and cooperation. However, governments, NGOs, donors, and international bodies remain wedded to stovepiped, single-sector approaches to diagnosing and responding to problems. This must change.

In 2009 in Washington, there is a greater appetite and a better political environment for taking on a broader approach. This has been framed as rebalancing the “3Ds” of defense, diplomacy, and development; as “sustainable security”; and as “smart power.” Whatever the name, environmental issues such as climate change and water should be front and center in these discussions.

4. It has a nuanced view of conflict and cooperation over natural resources. The report—and David Michel’s chapter in particular—successfully highlights the geopolitical implications of changes in climate and water without inaccurately hyping “water wars.” As we know, there is extensive subnational conflict around water, and we are likely to see more of this type of conflict under the conditions described in Troubled Waters. But states frequently work hard to cooperate and deflect violent conflict over transboundary water.

However, we need greater political and financial investment in transboundary institutions, as international cooperation around water doesn’t happen without a lot of effort. It needs to happen, though, because the future may be more dangerous than the past when it comes to water conflict and cooperation.

As we move forward on the water conflict and cooperation agenda, let’s not just focus on onset of conflict. Let’s be sure to look all along the conflict continuum, from prevention, to conflict, to post-conflict, and evaluate the high-politics importance of water at each of these stages.

I’ll end with an example of where we could broaden our approach to water in a current Washington policy context. Senator Dick Durbin recently introduced the Senator Paul Simon Water for the World Act of 2009, which builds on the Senator Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act of 2005. The new bill is heavily focused on access to safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene, which are indeed pressing priorities. It says some of the right things about transboundary water, but historically, this has received little funding.

Further complicating efforts to secure more robust funding for transboundary water management and security is the fact that other water activities are usually funded through the Department of State, but transboundary efforts are often put through a multilateral institution like the World Bank—and the Department of the Treasury, not State, typically manages that relationship. This complicated tangle of agencies and institutions emphasizes my earlier point that foreign assistance is too stovepiped, and that we must get better at working across sectors.

Photo: The Nile River Basin is shared by 10 countries. Courtesy of Flickr user Michael Gwyther-Jones.

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Focus author Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, who founded and directs the Ugandan NGO Conservation Through Public Health, won the Whitley Gold Award (see video of her work) for her efforts to protect the endangered mountain gorillas while improving local communities’ quality of life. The other five finalists were also seeking to reduce human-wildlife conflict in diverse contexts.

In Seed magazine, seven experts—including Peter Gleick and Mark Zeitoun—weigh in on whether “water wars” are a serious menace or an improbable threat, inflated by breathless media coverage of water shortages.

A major report on managing the health effects of climate change, co-authored by University College London and The Lancet, claims that climate change is the biggest health threat of the 21st century.

On his blog, Signs From Earth, National Geographic editor Dennis Dimick has collected a variety of resources about the possibility of “climate refugees.”

It’s not news that the U.S. and U.K. militaries are studying climate change’s potential security impacts, or seeking to increase energy efficiency on bases and in combat zones. But Geoffrey Lean, the environment editor of the Independent, is surprised that legendary Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap has come out against bauxite mining in Vietnam’s central highlands, which he says “will cause serious consequences on the environment, society and national defense.”

Photo: Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka receives the Whitley Gold Award from Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal. Courtesy of the Whitley Fund for Nature.

How Do Recent Population Trends Matter To Climate Change?, from Population Action International, offers the latest research from this constantly changing area of inquiry.

U.S. Global Health and National Security Policy, a timely report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, examines major threats to human health and international stability, including HIV/AIDS, SARS, pandemic influenza, and bioterrorism.

In the coming decades, Russia will confront “accelerated population decrease; a dwindling of the working-age population; the general ageing of the population; the drop in number of potential mothers; a large immigrant influx; and a possible rise in emigration rates,” warns a new report from the UN Development Programme.

In The National Interest and the Law of the Sea, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Scott Borgerson argues that ratifying the Law of the Sea Convention is vital to protecting the United States’ national security, economic, and environmental interests.

David Sullivan of Enough debates Harrison Mitchell and Nicolas Garrett of Resource Consulting Services (RCS) on the links between conflict and mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). RCS recently published a report arguing that mineral extraction is key to DRC’s development and not the primary cause of conflict in North Kivu.

Responding to the ubiquitous Monsanto ads that ask, “9 billion people to feed. A changing climate. Now what?,” Tod Preston of Population Action International responds, “family planning and empowering women, that’s what!”

Water and War, a publication of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), outlines how the ICRC provides access to clean water during conflict and humanitarian disasters.

The authors of Asia’s Next Challenge: Securing the Region’s Water Future, a report by the Asia Society, argue that population growth, urbanization, and climate change are converging to make water an important security issue in Asia. The authors argue for including water in policy and development discussions, but warn against “securitizing” the issue.

“The Arctic could slide into a new era featuring jurisdictional conflicts, increasingly severe clashes over the extraction of natural resources, and the emergence of a new ‘great game’ among the global powers,” argue Paul Berkman and Oran Young, two researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in Science. “However, the environment provides a physical and a conceptual framework to link government interests in the Arctic Ocean, as well as a template for addressing transboundary security risks cooperatively.” In the Washington Times, Paula Dobriansky, former U.S. undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs, argues that the Antarctic Treaty offers lessons for dealing with competing territorial claims in the Arctic.

A mark of a good event is that it generates further debate, questions, and ideas. “Water and International Development: A Dialogue,” a recent discussion at The Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies, was such an event. Geoff Dabelko, director of the Environment Change and Security Program at the Wilson Center, and Aaron Salzberg, special coordinator for water resources at the U.S. Department of State, went head-to-head to discuss water’s role in international development.

The discussion between Dabelko and Salzberg touched upon many issues I ran into while trying to program Water for the Poor Act funding while working as a natural resources adviser for the Economic Growth Office at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) mission in Ghana. Once we received the funding, there was an intra-office debate among:

1. People who wanted to make drip-irrigation work we were already funding fit the Water for the Poor Act definition;
2. People who thought the funds should be spent on a narrow set of water and sanitation interventions, such as borehole/latrine construction and water purification tablets; and
3. People who thought the funds should be spent on the larger-scale water and sanitation infrastructure that Ghana so desperately needs.

In short, too much energy was put into the semantics of the earmark language, which ultimately stymied creativity and forward-thinking ideas. Ultimately, the ongoing drip-irrigation project received some funds, and the rest of the money was given to the health team to disburse as they saw fit.

USAID mission offices have specific strategic priorities and associated operational plans, which dictate the makeup of the staff employed at any given time. In this case, there was no one water specialist who could take on this important task. I had an M.S. in water management, so I was passed the baton. If the Water for the Poor Act is going to have a significant impact, USAID missions must have the technical capacity to assimilate the funds.

Dabelko and Salzburg’s discussion brought up even more questions for me: How can the United States reconcile its bilateral earmark funding for water with the growing trend toward donor coordination—for instance, under the 2005 Paris Declaration, or, in the case of Ghana, the Multi-Donor Budget Support fund, which encourages donors to contribute direct financial support to the Ghanaian government to implement its Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategy? Is there a need to have water specialists assigned to USAID missions, rather than relying on specialists in Washington, D.C.? How can we make municipal financing mechanisms for infrastructure more attractive to Western funders and host-country governments? Although Dabelko and Salzburg might not have had all the answers to these questions, I’m heartened that they and other water experts are tackling the tough issues.

David Bonnardeaux is a freelance consultant on rural development and natural resource management for the World Bank, USAID, and CARE, among others. He is also an amateur photographer (www.davidbonnardeaux.smugmug.com). His next port of call is Vietnam.

Photos: Top: Boy pumping water, Volta Region, Ghana. Bottom: Girl collecting water from lake, Volta Region, Ghana. Courtesy of David Bonnardeaux.

Uncharted Waters: The U.S. Navy and Navigating Climate Change, a working paper by the Center for a New American Security, examines climate change’s implications for the U.S. Navy.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently chose Admiral James Stavridis, the former head of U.S. Southern Command known for his “smart power”/“sustainable security” approach, to lead U.S. European Command.

An Economist article highlights some of the linkages between water and political instability, energy, food, demography, and climate change.

The Governance of Nature and the Nature of Governance: Policy That Works for Biodiversity and Livelihoods, a report by the International Institute for Environment and Development, explores the success of local-level conservation. It features case studies from India, Tanzania, and Peru.

Sheila Herrling of the Center for Global Development argues that the USAID Administrator should become a permanent member of the National Security Council.

The Nation wonders whether nations go to war over water; Nature (subscription required) and Slate say “no.” ECSP has weighed in on this issue in the past.

Lisa Friedman of ClimateWire reports on Bangladesh’s attempts to prepare for the impacts of climate change.

A record-breaking 28,000 people, including five heads of state, participated in the Fifth World Water Forum in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. I was there, too, excited to be discussing this year’s theme, “Bridging Divides for Water.” Much of the conversation centered on how to bridge the remaining divides in meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)—especially MDG 7, which aims to halve the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015.

While notable progress has been made in many regions of the world, such as China and India, other areas, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, lag woefully behind. According to the most recent numbers (2006) by UNICEF and the World Health Organization, only 31 percent of the population in sub-Saharan Africa has access to sanitation, and there are 38 sub-Saharan African countries where sanitation coverage is less than 50 percent. Access to improved drinking water sources has increased to 64 percent across the region; however, increases in coverage are not keeping pace with population growth, and the current rate of provision is not adequate to meet the MDG drinking-water target.

The Fifth World Water Forum, however, marked a hopeful new development. For the first time, the region of the world with the most serious water challenges, Africa, used the Forum to announce an internally driven water and sanitation agenda with a united voice. With support from the African Development Bank, the African Union and the African Ministerial Conference on Water (AMCOW) unveiled a plan to implement existing political commitments to water and sanitation. An “Africa Regional Paper” informed by the First African Water Week, held in Tunis in March 2008, presents African perspectives on each of the themes of the Forum (global change and risk management; advancing human development and the MDGs; managing and protecting water resources; governance and management; finance; education, knowledge, and capacity development), with a key message of delivering on existing commitments. In response to this agenda, the G8 countries announced increased aid to Africa’s water sector.

The desire to solve the world’s water crisis has generated many reports and frameworks over the years, including the Brundtland Commission’s report “Our Common Future” and the World Water Forum process itself. But perhaps nothing is as effective as a proactive, united stance from sub-Saharan Africans themselves, which could go a long way toward ensuring aid is used appropriately and efficiently. The fact that South Africa will host the Sixth World Water Forum in March 2012 should provide another impetus for meeting water and sanitation targets on the continent.

Hope Herron is an environmental scientist with Tetra Tech, Inc. She is currently researching water security issues in the context of the new U.S. Africa Command and U.S. defense, diplomacy, and development frameworks.

Photo: A Sudanese girl fills a water jug at a pump. Courtesy of Flickr user Water for Sudan.

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