“Action is needed today,” said EcoPeace Middle East’s Palestinian Co-Director Nada Majdalani. EcoPeace’s Palestinian and Israeli Co-Directors spoke at a recent session of the United Nations Security Council that focused on potential solutions to the decades-old Palestinian-Israeli crisis. They emphasized the importance of cooperation over shared water resources to help address human health and national, regional, and global security concerns. While EcoPeace has been working to foster cooperation over water for more than 25 years, as a way to build peace in the Middle East, this was the first time the trilateral organization briefed the Security Council.

In many Middle Eastern wars, targeting civilian infrastructure has become all too common. As we documented in a previous article,  both state and non-state actors in wars since 2011 in Libya, Syria, and Yemen have targeted water, sanitation, and energy facilities to displace urban populations, punish civilians, and render local attempts to provide public services untenable.  Destroying environmental and civilian infrastructure directly undermines livelihoods and human security. 

For the past 20 years, Israelis and Palestinians alike have approached peace negotiations with the flawed assumption that, in order to reach an agreement, all core issues must be solved simultaneously. As the conflict continues to claim victims on both sides, it’s important to point out that when President Trump’s Middle East envoy, Jason Greenblatt, was looking for an early success in the new administration’s peace efforts, he found it – in water.

Climate change can undermine stability in the Middle East and North Africa, where both the United States and Europe have critical foreign policy and security interests. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region “is impacted by climate and resource scarcity risks now, in the medium, and in the long term,” said Nick Mabey, director and chief executive of the environmental think tank E3G, during a recent Wilson Center event on building climate resilience in MENA countries. “It’s a region that is highly vulnerable to climate change,” said Mabey, and “also incredibly vulnerable to global systems.” 

Scientists agree that many countries in tropical, subtropical, and arid regions should expect changes to water availability and supply from climate change. The U.S. intelligence community has likewise warned of water-driven challenges not only for countries directly affected by water changes, but indirectly to various U.S. national security interests. Perhaps not surprisingly then, the popular literature has been quite clear about prophesizing wars over water.

It was some point in May last year, shortly after ISIS surged into the city of Ramadi, and I was working on a story about Iraq’s fast-disappearing Mesopotamian Marshes. Keen to fact-check a few statistics with the Ministry of Water Resources and to hear the government line on the wetlands’ struggles, I dialed its Baghdad offices. After being passed from official to official like a hot potato, a young employee, Hussein, finally gave it to me straight. “No, no, we don’t have this sort of information,” he said, clearly impatient to get off the phone. “There are much more important things in Iraq right now.”

This month, Baskut Tuncak, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights and toxics, presented the findings of his report on the effects of hazardous substances on the lives of children around the world to the 33^rd session of the Human Rights Council. His conclusions were bold and brave for their implications on conflict: States should take responsibility for cleaning up the toxic remnants of war and providing medical aid to affected communities and individuals.