Water Wars

Water is becoming a key security issue in Sino-Indian relations and a potential source of enduring discord. China and India already are water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated farming and water intensive industries, together with the demands of a rising middle class, have led to a severe struggle for more water. Bhopal, India’s “City of Lakes,” where water was always plentiful, has become a parched wasteland of high and dry lakes where water shortage has turned deadly as residents fight to the last drop. Both countries have entered an era of perennial water scarcity, which before long is likely to equal in terms of per capita availability, the water shortages found in the Middle East.

Tibet and Xinjiang, China’s two westernmost regions, are not only in the forefront of China’s ethnic conflict, but climate change. While Tibet is getting mired in a deepening drought and declining water resources in future years, the water table in Xinjiang is on the rise and the dry climate is gradually becoming more humid. While Tibet is drying up, Xinjiang’s water reserves are growing at a rate equivalent to a rise in rainfall of 10mm per year.

Glaciers in Tibet have been melting for decades. From 1971 to 2002 they shrank by 5.3 percent, and between 2003 and 2008 they shrank a further 10 percent. Between 2002 and 2007 Tibet had suffered a drop in total water resources ─ ice, snow, surface and underground water ─ equivalent to a 30mm reduction in rainfall. Tibet experienced a drought in 2009 with some monitoring stations not recording rainfall for more than 200 days, and temperatures up to 2.3 degrees Celsius higher. The Tibetan plateau is the source of China’s major waterways, the Yangtze, Yellow and Lancang (Mekong) rivers.

Tibet is the source of most major Indian rivers. The Tibetan plateau’s vast glaciers, huge underground springs and high altitude make Tibet the world’s largest freshwater repository after the polar icecaps. Indeed, all of Asia’s major rivers, except the Ganges, originate in the Tibetan plateau. Even the Ganges’ two main tributaries flow in from Tibet.

China is now pursuing major inter-basin and inter-river-water transfer projects on the Tibetan plateau that threaten to reduce international river flows into India and other riparian states. The seeds of a potential water conflict have been sown. Water is now a political tool, not only on the Tibetan plateau, but globally.

It’s the same story in the Middle East. After a five-year drought, the region is headed toward a water calamity that could overwhelm all peace efforts. The Jordan River now has large sections reduced to a trickle. The Sea of Galilee is at its lowest point ever. The surface area of the Dead Sea has shrunk by a third. Iraq’s ancient marshes are now marked by large swaths of stalks and caked mud. In northern Syria, more than 160 villages in two years from 2007 to 2009 have run dry and been deserted by residents. In Gaza, 150,000 Palestinians have no access to tap water. In Israel, the pumps at the Sea of Galilee, its largest reservoir, are exposed above the water level rendering pumping impossible.