Water Conflicts

By Fester:

Water is in the news again today with two very interesting articles.  The first I saw via Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture and it is an analysis of where the globe's fresh water lies. Wired Magazine reports that roughly one in six people lack access to fresh water and the vast majority of the global supply of surplus water is located in areas that are not in areas of high demand. 

Like oil, water is not equitably distributed or respectful of political boundaries; about 50 percent of the world's freshwater lies in a half-dozen lucky countries....

No one who tries to eke out a living from this land is untouched. The 400,000-square-mile Murray-Darling basin, named for the two main rivers that run through it, receives only 6 percent of the continent's increasingly scarce rainfall. In some places, the groundwater is too salty to drink. Coastal cities are investing in desalination plants, but desalting technology is simply too expensive to use for agriculture. Without irrigation from the river, agriculture couldn't exist here. The farms would literally dry up and blow away...."The whole point of peak water," Gleick says, "is that we have to fundamentally rethink who gets to use water for what."

The second is a practical impact of limited water supplies as Iraq is experiencing significant water shortages as both the Tigris and Euphrates are running significantly lower than normal.  Iraqi officials are asking for Syrian and Turkish upstream users to release more flow downstream:

Abdullatif Jamal Rashid, the Iraqi minister for water resources, after talks with Turkish Foreign Trade Minister Kürşad Tüzmen. "In the past years, Turkey has given us enough water, even more than enough water. But this year we are having some difficulties. We are faced with a drought that has turned out to be more severe than expected. Therefore, we are asking for more water to ease our problems."

As the Wired article shows, water shortages are not limited to Third World or developping nations; instead they impact pretty much any community that is in arid, or semi-arid regions as well as communities that have grown significantly past their natural support capacity or economically feasibly agricultural patterns. This is an area of conflict that will grow as water is more similar to natural gas than the international oil markets. 

Water is a limited and barely trade-able resource right now in its direct form; instead water is traded as an embedded product.  American water surpluses are sent overseas in the form of beef, corn, wheat and soy exports.  Direct water exports from a regional and international perspective have little space too grow.  One of the largest sources of tradeable freshwater, the US-Canadian Great Lakes is being locked in by local users to keep the water within the Great Lakes drainage basin. Intra-regional trade such as the New York City water system expansion with a third aqueduct to the Catskills taking most of a generation to build and the grand water transfer systems in China are fifty year plans to move water from the south to the arid north.

Local areas short on controllable water resources will either have to import water intensive goods and services, change their agricultural profile to meet their local water needs, or engage in highly expensive and energy intensive extraction efforts.  The other option is to break the bottleneck either by innovation, unsustainable extraction as the region places a death bet, or fighting to gain access to nearby resources.