It has long been accepted that non-renewable natural resources like oil and gas are often the subject of conflict between both nation-states and social groups. But since the end of the Cold War, the idea that renewable resources like water and timber might also be a cause of conflict has steadily gained credence. This is particularly true in the case of water: in the early 1990s, a senior World Bank official famously predicted that “the wars of the next century will be fought over water,” while two years ago Indian strategist Brahma Chellaney made a splash in North America by claiming that water would be “Asia’s New Battleground.” But it has not quite turned out that way. The world has, so far, avoided inter-state conflict over water in the 21st century, but it has witnessed many localized conflicts, some involving considerable violence. As population growth, economic development, and climate change place growing strains on the world’s fresh water supplies, the relationship between resource scarcity, institutions, and conflict has become a topic of vocal debate among social and environmental scientists.
The idea that water scarcity leads to conflict is rooted in three common assertions. The first of these arguments is that, around the world, once-plentiful renewable resources like fresh water, timber, and even soils are under increasing pressure, and are therefore likely to stoke conflict among increasing numbers of people who seek to utilize dwindling supplies. A second, and often corollary, argument holds that water’s unique value to human life and well-being—namely that there are no substitutes for water, as there are for most other critical natural resources—makes it uniquely conductive to conflict. Finally, a third presumption behind the water wars hypothesis stems from the fact that many water bodies, and nearly all large river basins, are shared between multiple countries. When an upstream country can harm its downstream neighbor by diverting or controlling flows of water, the argument goes, conflict is likely to ensue.
But each of these assertions depends on making assumptions about how people react to water scarcity, the means they have at their disposal to adapt to it, and the circumstances under which they are apt to cooperate rather than to engage in conflict. Untangling these complex relationships promises a more refined understanding of whether and how water scarcity might lead to conflict in the 21st century—and how cooperation can be encouraged instead.
Article
Rethinking Conflict over Water
Scott M. Moore
Article
Agricultural Nitrogen and Phosphorus Pollution in Surface Waters
Marianne Bechmann and Per Stålnacke
Nutrient pollution can have a negative impact on the aquatic environment, with loss of biodiversity, toxic algal blooms, and a deficiency in dissolved oxygen in surface waters. Agricultural production is one of the main contributors to these problems; this article provides an overview of and background for the main biogeochemical processes causing agricultural nutrient pollution of surface waters. It discusses the main features of the agricultural impact on nutrient loads to surface waters, focusing on nitrogen and phosphorus, and describes some of the main characteristics of agricultural management, including processes and pathways from soil to surface waters. An overview of mitigation measures to reduce pollution, retention in the landscape, and challenges regarding quantification of nutrient losses are also dealt with. Examples are presented from different spatial scales, from field and catchment to river basin scale.
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Decision-Making in a Water Crisis: Lessons From the Cape Town Drought for Urban Water Policy
Johanna Brühl, Leonard le Roux, Martine Visser, and Gunnar Köhlin
The water crisis that gripped Cape Town over the 2016–2018 period gained global attention. For a brief period of time in early 2018, it looked as if the legislative capital of South Africa would become the first major city in the world to run out of water. The case of Cape Town has broad implications for how we think about water management in a rapidly urbanizing world. Cities in the global South, especially, where often under-capacitated urban utilities need to cope with rapid demographic changes, climate change, and numerous competing demands on their tight budgets, can learn from Cape Town’s experience.
The case of Cape Town draws attention to the types of decisions policymakers and water utilities face in times of crisis. It illustrates how these decisions, while being unavoidable in the short term, are often sub-optimal in the long run. The Cape Town drought highlights the importance of infrastructure diversification, better groundwater management, and communication and information transparency to build trust with the public. It also shows what governance and institutional changes need to be made to ensure long-term water security and efficient water management. The implementation of all of these policies needs to address the increased variability of water supplies due to increasingly erratic rainfall and rapidly growing urban populations in many countries. This necessitates a long-term planning horizon.
Article
The Emergence of Environment as a Security Imperative
Felix Dodds
The emergence of environment as a security imperative is something that could have been avoided. Early indications showed that if governments did not pay attention to critical environmental issues, these would move up the security agenda. As far back as the Club of Rome 1972 report, Limits to Growth, variables highlighted for policy makers included world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion, all of which impact how we live on this planet.
The term environmental security didn’t come into general use until the 2000s. It had its first substantive framing in 1977, with the Lester Brown Worldwatch Paper 14, “Redefining Security.” Brown argued that the traditional view of national security was based on the “assumption that the principal threat to security comes from other nations.” He went on to argue that future security “may now arise less from the relationship of nation to nation and more from the relationship between man to nature.”
Of the major documents to come out of the Earth Summit in 1992, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development is probably the first time governments have tried to frame environmental security. Principle 2 says: “States have, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law, the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental and developmental policies, and the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other States or of areas beyond the limits of national.”
In 1994, the UN Development Program defined Human Security into distinct categories, including:
• Economic security (assured and adequate basic incomes).
• Food security (physical and affordable access to food).
• Health security.
• Environmental security (access to safe water, clean air and non-degraded land).
By the time of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, in 2002, water had begun to be identified as a security issue, first at the Rio+5 conference, and as a food security issue at the 1996 FAO Summit. In 2003, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan set up a High-Level Panel on “Threats, Challenges, and Change,” to help the UN prevent and remove threats to peace. It started to lay down new concepts on collective security, identifying six clusters for member states to consider. These included economic and social threats, such as poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation.
By 2007, health was being recognized as a part of the environmental security discourse, with World Health Day celebrating “International Health Security (IHS).” In particular, it looked at emerging diseases, economic stability, international crises, humanitarian emergencies, and chemical, radioactive, and biological terror threats. Environmental and climate changes have a growing impact on health. The 2007 Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) identified climate security as a key challenge for the 21st century. This was followed up in 2009 by the UCL-Lancet Commission on Managing the Health Effects of Climate Change—linking health and climate change.
In the run-up to Rio+20 and the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals, the issue of the climate-food-water-energy nexus, or rather, inter-linkages, between these issues was highlighted. The dialogue on environmental security has moved from a fringe discussion to being central to our political discourse—this is because of the lack of implementation of previous international agreements.
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Desalination Technology and Advancement
P.S. Goh, A.F. Ismail, and N. Hilal
Water scarcity as an outcome of global population expansion, climate change, and industrialization calls for new and innovative technologies to provide sustainable solutions to address this alarming issue. Seawater and brackish water are abundantly available on earth for drinking water and industrial use, and desalination is a promising approach to resolving this global challenge. Recently, the considerable reduction in the cost of desalination has contributed to the growing capacity for global desalination. The desalination technologies that have been deployed worldwide for clean water production can be categorized into two main types: membrane-based and thermal-based. Technological advancement in this field has focused on the reduction of capital and operating cost, particularly the energy consumption of the systems. Seawater and brackish desalination technologies are promising solutions for water shortages.
Article
Water as a Merit Good
Michael Hanemann and Dale Whittington
In economics, a merit good is a good which it is judged that an individual or group of individuals should have (at least up to a certain quantity) on the basis of some concept of need, rather than on the basis of ability or willingness to pay. Examples include public elementary education and free hospitals for the poor alongside access to safe, affordable, and reliable water and sanitation. Exactly how a merit good is provided can be subjected to an economic test, but not whether the merit good should be provided. While there are some overlaps in application, the concept of a merit good is distinct from other economic concepts: A merit good may or may not be a public good, and it may or may not involve an externality. However, water and sanitation infrastructure may indeed be viewed as a form of social overhead capital.
A merit good is an economic concept; the human right is an ethical concept—and, sometimes, a legal concept. That said, the concept of a merit good and the judgment that a particular item is a merit good clearly have an ethical component. If one accepts the existence of a human right to water and sanitation, that could certainly motivate a government decision to make the provision of water and sanitation a merit good.
Even if a commodity is deemed to be a merit good, that still leaves open questions: To which group of people should it be provided as a merit good? In what quantity should it be provided? At what price, if any? By whom should it be provided? And how should the cost be funded?
Article
Use of Experimental Economics in Policy Design and Evaluation: An Application to Water Resources and Other Environmental Domains
Simanti Banerjee
Economics conceptualizes harmful effects to the environment as negative externalities that can be internalized through implementation of policies involving regulatory and market-based mechanisms, and behavioral economic interventions. However, effective policy will require knowledge and understanding of intended and unintended stakeholder behaviors and consequences and the context in which the policy will be implemented. This mandate is nontrivial since policies once implemented can be hard to reverse and often have irreversible consequences in the short and/or long run, leading to high social costs. Experimental economics (often in combination with other empirical evaluation methods) can help by testing policies and their impacts prior to modification of current policies, and design and implementation of new ones. Such experimental evaluation can include lab and field experiments, and choice experiments. Additionally, experimental policy evaluation should pay attention to scaling up problems and the ethical ramifications of the treatment. This would ensure that the experimental findings will remain relevant when rolled out to bigger populations (hence retaining policy makers’ interest in the method and evidence generated by it), and the treatment to internalize the externality will not create or exacerbate societal disparities and ethical challenges.
Article
Environmental Impacts of Tropical Soybean and Palm Oil Crops
Kimberly M. Carlson and Rachael D. Garrett
Oil crops play a critical role in global food and energy systems. Since these crops have high oil content, they provide cooking oils for human consumption, biofuels for energy, feed for animals, and ingredients in beauty products and industrial processes. In 2014, oil crops occupied about 20% of crop harvested area worldwide. While small-scale oil crop production for subsistence or local consumption continues in certain regions, global demand for these versatile crops has led to substantial expansion of oil crop agriculture destined for export or urban markets. This expansion and subsequent cultivation has diverse effects on the environment, including loss of forests, savannas, and grasslands, greenhouse gas emissions, regional climate change, biodiversity decline, fire, and altered water quality and hydrology. Oil palm in Southeast Asia and soybean in South America have been identified as major proximate causes of tropical deforestation and environmental degradation. Stringent conservation policies and yield increases are thought to be critical to reducing rates of soybean and oil palm expansion into natural ecosystems. However, the higher profits that often accompany greater yields may encourage further expansion, while policies that restrict oil crop expansion in one region may generate secondary “spillover” effects on other crops and regions. Due to these complex feedbacks, ensuring a sustainable supply of oil crop products to meet global demand remains a major challenge for agricultural companies, farmers, governments, and civil society.
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Hybrid Modes of Urban Water Delivery in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
Alison Post and Isha Ray
Most urban residents in high-income countries obtain piped and treated water for drinking and domestic use from centralized utility-run water systems. In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), however, utilities work alongside myriad other service providers that deliver water to hundreds of millions of city-dwellers. Hybrid modes of water delivery in urban areas in low- and middle-income countries are systems in which a variety of state and nonstate actors contribute to the delivery of water to households, schools, healthcare facilities, businesses, and government offices. Historically, the field has evolved to include within-utility networks and outside-the-utility provision mechanisms. Utilities service the urban core through network connections, while nonstate, smaller-scale providers supplement utility services both inside and outside the piped network. The main reform waves since the 1990s—privatization and corporatization—have done little to alter the hybrid nature of provision. Numerous case studies of nonutility water providers suggest that they are imperfect substitutes for utilities. They reach millions of households with no access to piped water, but the water they deliver tends to be of uncertain quality and is typically far more expensive than utility water. Newer work on utility-provided water and utility reforms has highlighted the political challenges of private sector participation in urban water; debates have also focused on the importance of contractual details such as tariff structures and investor incentives. New research has produced numerous studies on LMICs on the ways in which utilities extend their service areas and service types through explicit and implicit relationships with front-line water workers and with supplemental nonstate water suppliers. From the nonutility perspective, debates animated by questions of price and quality, the desirability or possibility of regulation, and the compatibility (or lack thereof) between reliance on small-scale water providers and the human right to safe water, are key areas of research. While understanding the hybrid nature of water delivery is essential for responsible policy formulation and for understanding inequalities in the urban sphere, there is no substitute for the convenience and affordability of universal utility provision, and no question that research on the conditions under which particular types of reforms can improve utility provision is sorely needed.
Article
Water and Development: A Gender Perspective
Yoshika S. Crider and Isha Ray
The large and multidisciplinary literature on water for domestic use and gender has two primary foci: (1) the negative health and well-being impacts of inadequate access to safe water, and (2) the effects of women’s participation in water allocation and management decisions. These foci are reflected in both the research and policy literatures. Smaller bodies of work exist on water and social power, and on nonmaterial values and meanings of water. The term “gender” refers to the socially constructed roles and identities of girls, women, boys, men, and nonbinary people, but the literature on water and gender to date is mainly concerned with women and girls, on whom inadequate water access places a disproportionate burden.
The water and health literature during the Millennium Development Goals era focused overwhelmingly on the consequences of unsafe drinking water for child health, while paying less attention to the health of the water carriers and managers. Studies on women’s participation in water-related decisions in the household or community were (and to some extent remain) mixed with respect to their effects on equity, access, and empowerment. Both the health and participation strands often assumed, implicitly or explicitly, that water work was women’s work. Yet data on access was mainly collected and presented by household or community, with little effort to disaggregate access and use by gender.
In keeping with the spirit of the Sustainable Development Goals, the post-2015 literature has gone beyond a focus on infectious diseases to include the psychosocial stresses of coping with unreliable or inadequate water supplies. These stresses are acknowledged to fall disproportionately on women. A relatively small literature exists on the health impacts of carrying heavy loads of water and on the hard choices to be made when safe water is scarce. The negative impacts of inadequate domestic water access on girls’ education opportunities, on the safety of those who walk long distances to collect water, and on family conflicts have also been studied. Access is being defined beyond the household to prioritize safe water availability in schools and in healthcare facilities, both of which serve vulnerable populations. Both are institutional settings with a majority-female workforce. The definition of domestic water post-2015 has also broadened beyond drinking water to include water for cooking, sanitation, and basic hygiene, all of which particularly concern women’s well-being.
Intersectionality with respect to gender, class, ability, and ethnicity has started to inform research, in particular research influenced by feminist political ecology and/or indigenous values of water. Political ecology has drawn attention to structural inequalities and their consequences for water access, a perspective that is upstream of public health’s concerns with health impacts. Research on participation is being augmented with studies of leadership and decision-making, both within communities as well as within the water sector. Critical studies of gender, water, and participation have argued that development agencies can limit modes of participation to those that “fit” their larger goals, e.g., efficiency and cost-recovery in drinking water systems. Studies have also analyzed the gendered burden of paying for safe water, especially as the pressure for cost recovery has grown within urban water policy.
These are significant and growing new directions that acknowledge the breadth and complexities of the gender and water world; they do not simply call for gender-disaggregated data but attempt, albeit imperfectly, to take water research towards the recognition of gender justice as a foundation for water justice for all.
Article
Input–Output Models Applied to Environmental Analysis
Joaquim J.M. Guilhoto
Input–Output (I–O) models and analysis were originally conceived by the Nobel Prize winner Wassily Leontief in the 1930s as a tool that can be used by economists and economic policy makers to help in their decision process. The I–O models provide a “picture” of how the economy works, that is, what are the necessities to produce goods and services, how this production generates income, profits and taxes, and how this income is spent. In a simplified way the I–O models can be seen as the model implementation of the economy circular-flow diagrams usually shown in economics introductory courses. Associated with the theory behind I–O models and analysis, I–O tables contain the empirical information necessary to implement these models and theory.
Taking, for example, the production of computer screens:
• On the production side, the I–O models have information on: (a) how much is spent on the inputs, goods and services necessary to produce the screens; (b) whether these inputs have their origin in the domestic market or are imported; (c) how much was paid in tax to the government; (d) what was the total amount paid in wages and salaries; (e) what were the profits of the producing firms; (f) how many computer screens are sold on the domestic market or on the international market (exported); and (g) whether they are sold directly to the final consumer or are used as a production input, that is, incorporated into other goods, for example, a refrigerator with a computer screen;
• On the demand side, the I–O models, taking into consideration the total income received by the different players in the economy, that is, households, firms, and government, have information on: (a) how the income of these players is spent on goods and services, and whether it is used for consumption or investment; (b) whether these goods and services were produced domestically or abroad (imported); and (c) how much consumer tax was paid.
From the aforementioned structure of I–O models, and using economic mathematical models, it is possible to measure the direct and indirect inputs needed to produce goods and services in the economy, for example, to produce a car there is no need for agricultural goods as a direct input for production, but the fabric used in the car seats or on the car carpets could have come from cotton, which is an agricultural good, so, cotton is an indirect input used in car production.
I–O models, by their capability to show a complete picture of the economic system, and tracing of the origin of direct and indirect inputs used in the production process, can be used in environmental studies by linking economic and environmental variables, on the production and consumption sides. From the production side it is possible to measure, by considering the direct and indirect inputs used, how many natural resources were used and how much pollution was generated in producing the goods and services. On the demand side it is possible to measure the environmental variables, natural resources, and pollution, embodied in the goods and services consumed in the economy. Expanding I–O models to a global scale, that is, using inter-country I–O models, it is possible to measure the environmental impacts, and contents, of the goods and services by country of origin of production and by countries of consumption.
