Water Related Issues May Arise Amid Other Pandemic Problems
Bogota: From Yemen to India, and parts of Central America to the African Sahel, about a quarter of the world's people face extreme water shortages that are fuelling conflict, social unrest and migration, water experts said on Wednesday (Sept 2).
With the world's population rising and climate change bringing more erratic rainfall, including severe droughts, competition for scarcer water is growing, they said, with serious consequences.
"If there is no water, people will start to move. If there is no water, politicians are going to try and get their hands on it and they might start to fight over it," warned Ms Kitty van der Heijden, head of international cooperation at the Netherlands' foreign ministry.
"It's threats like these that keep me up at night," the diplomat told a webinar hosted by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a US-based research group.
According to the WRI, 17 countries face "extremely high" levels of water stress, while more than two billion people live in countries experiencing "high" water stress.
One in four children worldwide will be living in areas of extremely high water stress by 2040, researchers estimated.
In terms of water availability, "at some point we are going to hit the wall, and that wall might be different in different places", Ms Heijden said.
Climate change is compounding the challenge, she said, with cities such as India's Chennai and South Africa's Cape Town battling severe water shortages in recent years related in part to erratic rainfall.
Disputes over water have for millennia served as a flashpoint, driving political instability and conflict, the water experts said.
And "the risks of water-related disputes are growing .. in part because of growing scarcity over water", said Mr Peter Gleick, co-founder of the California-based Pacific Institute, which jointly published the report with WRI and the Water, Peace and Security Partnership.
But as water scarcity grows, water systems are also increasingly becoming targets in other types of conflicts, said Mr Gleick, whose institute has compiled a chronology of water conflicts that dates back 5,000 years.
Recurring droughts in parts of Central America and the African Sahel in recent years have triggered migration as subsistence farmers, whose harvests have been decimated by low rainfall, seek refuge and jobs in other countries.
