United Nations Environment Programme (United Nations Environment Programme2009) reported: ‘Since 1990 at least eighteen violent conflicts have been fuelled by the exploitation of natural resources. In fact, recent research suggests that over the last sixty years at least 40% of all intrastate conflicts have a link to natural resources. Civil wars such as those in Liberia, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo have centred on ‘high-value’ resources like timber, diamonds, gold, minerals and oil. Other conflicts, including those in Darfur and the Middle East, have involved control of scarce resources such as fertile land and water.’ The report continued: ‘Environmental factors are rarely, if ever, the sole cause of violent conflict. Ethnicity, adverse economic conditions, low levels of international trade and conflict in neighbouring countries are all significant drivers of violence’.
Communities that are at most risk are those in poor rural, peri-urban and even urban settings in arid and semi-arid environments, where government is weak and resource management inadequate (Evans2010; Calow et al.1997). Residents of small island states may also be at risk, as demands from growing populations overtake resource potential (Watson et al.1998). Even in richer countries such as the United States, groundwater-fed cities such as Orlando, Florida and Tuscon, Arizona are at risk of failing supply, although here strong governance will help alleviate stress and avoid the potential for conflict.
In many poorer countries, the risk of supply failure, as well as the possibility of conflict, are increased by inadequate monitoring and a lack of understanding of the groundwater resource, coupled with poor governance and the optimistic administrative perception that there is enough water for all comers (Figure 3). The paradigm is that the risk of supply failure is greatly enhanced by conflict, be it local, national or regional, while water scarcity is also of itself a recognised cause of conflict (United Nations Environment Programme2009).
Problems with groundwater scarcity are continually being reported in new parts of the world. (Robins et al.2013) demonstrate that demand has now outstripped resource potential in four of the fifteen administrative water management units in Malawi. All four already have relatively high-density rural populations. Yet further mining of the available groundwater resource is not viable in Malawi – whose population, growing by almost 3 per cent a year (CIA World Fact Book), is expected to almost triple to over 45 m by 2050 – because the aquifer is a shallow weathered zone in ancient crystalline rocks with little storage potential, barely capable of providing enough to support existing communities through five or six consecutive dry cycle years within a recognised overall eleven-year climate cycle (Mwafulirwa1999).
Work in South Africa supports the concept that resource potential is inadequate to sustain demand in some areas. (Van Wyk et al.2011) have determined recharge rate potentials in the Western Cape that are negligible. Here the wet and dry cycle is slightly less distinct than in Malawi, and lasts an average of 18 years (Taljaard1996). When the water finally runs out for the local aquifer-dependent communities, the unfortunate people will inevitably leave their land and head to the towns and cities as dispossessed citizens, placing an additional burden of provision on an already overstretched government.
Groundwater mining has long been advocated for short-term gain in the hope that it may pay for some long-term remedy of supply. The Great Man-Made River Project, first conceived in the late 1960s and funded by Libya, set about mining the Nubian Sandstone aquifer (Salem1992), with an original design life of 1000 years – although the project is likely to run dry in 60 to 100 years (Christian Science Monitor). Water first came on stream in 1989 and is now used for urban water supply as well as irrigation. The Nubian sandstone aquifer, which last received recharge in the Pleistocene era, will not recover unless pluvial conditions reoccur.
The income and wellbeing derived from irrigating farmland and supplying towns and cities has been considerable, although everything could be in jeopardy as a consequence of recent civil conflict associated with the 'Arab Spring.’ Egypt, north-eastern Chad and north-western Sudan also have trans-boundary interests in the fossil water that need to be addressed if future conflict with those countries is to be avoided.
There are numerous smaller-scale groundwater-mining projects around the world that have proved just as controversial. A halt was recently called to a proposed coalmine and power station in eastern Botswana, a scheme designed to sell electricity to South Africa using water mined from the Karroo sandstone aquifer at Mmamabula. Environmentalists were concerned about the impact on groundwater-dependent ecosystems, although the ultimate reason for shelving the scheme was the unacceptable business risk associated with international economic and political uncertainty over the lifetime of the project.
Another area of potential conflict concerns transboundary aquifers (TBAs), defined as a groundwater unit shared by two or more nations (International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre2012). The evaluation of TBAs is often difficult due to scarcity of data.
At the last count, 273 TBAs had been mapped around the world (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation2009), a number that is still growing as hydrogeological knowledge advances. Of the 273, just four are currently managed in a genuinely collaborative way – two in Africa, the Genevese aquifer straddling the border between France and Switzerland, and the Guarani aquifer shared by Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. The UN has been seeking to codify international rules on the management of TBAs for over 15 years. Until it succeeds, the management of TBAs and the allocation of resources between neighbouring political entities will generally go on depending on ad hoc bilateral agreements between the states involved.
For a TBA agreement to succeed, due attention must always be paid to the social and political impact on either side of the affected border. Not all TBAs require such careful handling – for example, when population density and demand on both sides of the border are low – but many others that are not properly managed have the potential to generate considerable socio-political friction (Davies et al.2012).
Among the best known examples is the West Bank Mountain Aquifer, which is recharged in Palestine but with groundwater that discharges in springs in neighbouring Israel (Mansour et al.2012). The Jewish state, founded on the principal of ‘making the desert bloom,’ regards irrigation as essential to its existence. Some 60% of the water it consumes in this water-scarce land is used for irrigation. In a water-scarce land, however, many Palestinians consider this unconscionable when agriculture accounts for just 1.6% of Israel’s GDP (Deconinck2006).
Israel’s continuing occupation of the Golan Heights – historically Syrian territory, annexed by Israel following the Six-Day War of 1967 – is largely about retaining control of the water produced on the high ground. The Golan Heights may provide as much as 15% of Israel’s water, whether as surface water or indirectly through local aquifer recharge (Dafny et al.2006). The control of groundwater has also been a key strategy in Israel’s physical and economic blockade of Palestinian Gaza, which again flared into violence – including the first ever exchange of long-range missile fire – in November 2012. Israel controls the upstream parts of the shallow coastal aquifer on which the Gaza Strip depends. In 2008, Israeli authorities reportedly constructed trap wells along the Strip’s northern borders in a deliberate attempt to divert the abstracted water to recharge its own aquifers (Kishawi2011).
Consideration also needs to be given to water stress in small island states. The latest island to ‘go critical’ is Anguilla in the West Indies. Anguilla is a low-lying limestone island with a shallow lens of renewable fresh water overlying a saline interface with seawater below. Careful monitoring and management of abstraction used to ensure continuity of supply to ‘The Valley’ and the outlying rural areas, albeit a supply with a slight brackish taste. However, recent systemic failures have led to the destruction of the fresh water lens, and the island’s water supply has now gone saline. Alternative means of supply urgently need to be found if the island is to remain tenable for many of its 15 000 inhabitants: a remedy that will inevitably cost far more than timely intervention and advice on water conservation and management techniques would have done. Although conflict is unlikely in Anguilla, the prospect of mass displacement of the population is real.
Perhaps the most critical groundwater issue of modern times concerns the Sana’a sandstone basin aquifer that supplies the capital city of Yemen with its drinking water. Media reports consistently state that this ancient city – a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the oldest inhabited places on earth, said to have been founded by Shem, the son of Noah – will run dry in 2017.
The accuracy of this unusually specific date, however, is suspect. Hydrogeological evaluation of the aquifer yielding such a precise prognosis is not forthcoming. Although some investigation has been carried out, and a small body of literature exists e.g. (Alderwish1995; Alderwish & Dottridge1998; Handley & Dottridge1997; Al Hamdi2000), adequate monitoring of the resource has not taken place and there are few historical data with which to calibrate a workable groundwater flow model. Prognoses of how much water remains in store in the aquifer cannot, therefore, be made with any degree of certainty.
The Canadian engineering consultancy, Hydrosult Inc, along with the North Carolina-based RTP International, continue to collect data on behalf of the World Bank, which in turn has attempted to put forward various policy options for and in co-operation with the Yemeni government (Research Triangle Park International2012; Hydrosult Inc2010). The World Bank acknowledges, however, that their advice is based on results that are ‘only indicative and not definitive, mainly because, under the difficult political situation in Yemen during the preparation of the study, [our engineering consultants] were not in a position to assess either the social impacts of their options or the scope for implementation’ (Garduño2012).
That Sana’a’s aquifer is running dry is not in doubt. It is when and how it runs dry that needs evaluating so that an ameliorating strategy can be put in place. Sana’a is one of the few capital cities in the region to be situated in the semi-arid inland mountainous part of the country. Others, such as Mogadishu in Somalia, are on the coast where some groundwater is available in wadi fan deposits, and where desalination of seawater could be viable in a richer society. Many of the social options available in Sana’a are drastic. The government of Ali Abdullah Saleh (1990–2012) contemplated relocating the entire population to the coast: effectively an abandonment of a city that has been inhabited for thousands of years.
According to another scenario, as the aquifer fails, private suppliers will for a time attempt to meet demand using water tankers – in fact, an already thriving business in many parts of Yemen. But the cost of privately supplied water would soon rise too high for Sana’a’s poorer classes, who would likely lead an exodus from the city voluntarily. Without the street-cleaners, the hospital workers, the tradesmen and all those others who keep the engine of any modern city running, life would soon become intolerable even for those who could afford expensive privately imported water, who would then follow the working classes out, leading to the same outcome as the forced relocation mooted by the Saleh government.
The possibility of social chaos in Yemen has long been foreshadowed across the Gulf of Aden in Somalia, which in 2011 was afflicted by the region’s worst drought for 60 years. Somalia has had no properly functioning central government since the downfall of Siad Barre in 1991. For the last five years, the administration in Mogadishu has been battling al-Shabaab, an al-Qaida-affiliated Islamist insurgency that still controls much of the south of the country. And it was the south of the country that was worst affected by the drought, in large part because of al-Shabaab’s mismanagement of the environment. This was despite the fact that Somalia’s only permanent river, the Juba, is located in the south.
For several years, al-Shabaab did nothing to rein in a boom in the production of charcoal, the sale of which was critical to the funding of their insurgency. Uncontrolled tree-felling has left swathes of their territory barren and open to desertification. For over five years, al-Shabaab also did nothing to maintain or repair irrigation systems around the Juba, or even the south’s network of wells, an estimated 95% of which were filled in with rocks or otherwise destroyed during the inter-clan violence of the 1990s (Fergusson2013).
The consequence was an official famine, and huge numbers of people fleeing the land. US officials estimate that 29 000 children under the age of five died over three months in summer 2011. The suffering was exacerbated when al-Shabaab responded to the famine by calling it ‘infidel propaganda’ and denying its existence. Foreign aid agencies were prevented from operating in the areas controlled by the militants, while fleeing refugees were ordered to return home and instructed to ‘pray for rain.’ This was a disastrous piece of public relations in a nation of nomad pastoralists, whose survival has long depended on the ability to move to greener pastures when the rains fail. Historians may well judge the consequent collapse of public support for al-Shabaab as the turning point in the UN-backed war against them.
Somalia’s civil conflict has been sustained by rivalry between clans, who have always competed over scant water resources in a dry land. Disputes over water used to be settled by the application of xeer, the country’s ancient customary law, traditionally administered by elders from the rival clans gathered at a neutral location, out in the open beneath a tree. Somalia’s problems mostly stem from the 1980s when the dictator Siad Barre ran down the xeer system in favour of scientific socialism. The old social structures were then further destroyed in the 1990s by civil war and the massive displacement of the population that followed. The collapse of central government forced Somalis to fall back on the only social organisations that survived that chaos: their tribes.
The Somali experience may have important lessons for Yemen, where society is organised on comparable tribal lines. If Yemen’s aquifers were to start running dry, it is not difficult to imagine how tribesmen might resort to filling up the wells of rivals to prevent the abstraction of groundwater needed for the survival of their tribal kin. The UN-backed military campaign against al-Shabaab continues, amid ongoing speculation by security analysts that the insurgents are closely linked to al-Qaida’s Yemen-based franchise, AQAP (al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula). In 2011 AQAP, profiting from the power vacuum that followed the ousting of President Saleh, gained control of several cities in the southern Yemeni province of Abyan.
Yemen itself remains perilously unstable, and the revolution promised by the popular 'Arab Spring’ is still incomplete. That upheaval began in May 2011 in Ta’iz, Yemen’s former capital, where demonstrators protesting the lack of water provision had occupied a central city square. Ta’iz’s water supply is poor even by Yemen’s low standards. Householders have long been forced to go without running water for periods as long as 40 days e.g. (El-Sharabi2006). The protest turned violent, and quickly spread to the rest of the country, when Saleh’s troops used extreme force to clear the square.
The spark that ignited the ongoing conflagration in Syria was similar. Here it began in the southern city of Daraa near the Jordanian border, a region that had suffered severe water shortages for months previously. The hardship in rural areas was exacerbated by the local governor, an Assad regime placeman, whose system of water allocation, including drilling rights, was notoriously corrupt. The flashpoint came when several schoolchildren, all members of the same Al-Abazeed family, were arrested for writing anti-Assad graffiti on the walls of their school. The ensuing public protest was met with regime gunfire, and the unrest soon escalated. It is telling that the regime then tried to bring Daraa back into line by cutting off the city’s water supply altogether. In autumn 2012, there were reports that they had even tried to poison a local reservoir. The shortage of groundwater played a central catalytic role in both Yemen and Syria; and as we have seen, the destabilising influence of groundwater scarcity in these countries is far from played out yet (Arnold;Famiglietti;Gleick).