Himalayan Water Security: The Challenges for South and Southeast Asia

The scramble for control of natural resources to support economic and population growth, combined with the uncertain effects of climate change on the Tibetan Plateau, is raising tensions in Asia over Himalayan water resources.

Ten of the region’s largest and longest rivers (the Amu Darya, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Indus, Irrawaddy, Mekong, Salween, Tarim, Yangtze, and Yellow) originate in the Himalayas. These rivers help provide water, food, and energy for nearly 4 billion people in China and across South and Southeast Asia—nearly half of the world’s population. However, depletion and diversion of these transborder resources to meet growing industrial, agricultural, and urban demands have the potential to trigger far-reaching economic, social, and environmental challenges.

The lack of comprehensive and effective regional frameworks for cooperation hinders sustainable management of these waterways. China, which controls the headwaters of these rivers, has an enormous need for Himalayan water to satisfy economic and energy demands but has little incentive to participate in formal water-sharing and water-management agreements with its neighbors. China’s dam-building and water-diversion projects are a source of major concern to the countries downstream, which often complain about Beijing’s lack of transparency and reluctance to share information. Although managing water-sharing relations with China might be the most prominent challenge, cooperation is not much easier at the middle and lower reaches of the rivers. Collaboration in South and Southeast Asia is frequently frustrated by competing national interests, economic priorities, political disputes, and weak regional organizations. In addition to the environmental impacts of man-made diversion projects and unsustainable freshwater usage, there is also inadequate cooperation on scientific research to understand and prepare for the effects of climate change on the region’s water supplies.

This Asia Policy roundtable contains seven essays that discuss the challenges and implications of water security in Asia and recommend steps that both upstream and downstream countries could take to better manage the region’s shared water resources.

Asia’s Unstable Water Tower: The Politics, Economics, and Ecology of Himalayan Water Projects
Kenneth Pomeranz

China’s Upstream Advantage in the Great Himalayan Watershed
Jennifer L. Turner, Susan Chan Shifflett, and Robert Batten

Melting the Geopolitical Ice in South Asia
Robert G. Wirsing

Himalayan Water Security: A South Asian Perspective
Tushaar Shah and Mark Giordano

Hydropower Dams on the Mekong: Old Dreams, New Dangers
Richard P. Cronin

Climate Change and Water Security in the Himalayan Region
Richard Matthew

Securing the Himalayas as the Water Tower of Asia: An Environmental Perspective
Jayanta Bandyopadhyay

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As I have been arguing for a number of years South Asia needs to re-negotiate the Indus Water Treaty to encompass Afghainstan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Nepal and Pakistan before the region starts to suffer from water insecurity and the effects of climate change. Editor

 

 

 

© 2014

Water Wars in Asia?

The battles of yesterday were fought over land. Those of today are over energy. And the battles of tomorrow may be over water.

Nowhere is the danger greater than in Asia. Drought, urbanization, pollution, and inadequate infrastructure have made Asia the world’s most water-scarce continent on a per-capita basis. Many of its water sources cross national boundaries, creating the potential for international conflict as supplies dwindle. Now global warming is raising the stakes further, causing rising sea levels, more severe floods and droughts, and the melting of the glaciers in the Tibetan plateau.

The water security challenges facing China and India in particular have consequences not just for the two rising powers, but for Asia as a whole. They threaten to reduce economic growth across the region, exacerbate ongoing territorial disputes, and impose further hardships on Asia’s poor. Asia Society Northern California is pleased to host national security expertBrahma Chellaney, water expert Peter Gleick, and futurist Peter Schwartz to discuss what is becoming Asia’s defining crisis of the 21st century.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Dehli. He has written six books on international relations and geopolitics, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground, which won the Asia Society’s Bernard Schwartz Book Award in 2012. His newest book, Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Crisis, has just been released.

Peter Gleick is Co-founder and President of the Pacific Institute. Dr. Gleick is the author of many scientific papers and nine books on water, including The World’s Water and Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water. He is the recipient of the MacArthur “genius” Fellowship, among other awards.

Peter Schwartz (moderator), a renowned futurist, is Senior Vice President for Global Government Relations and Strategic Planning at Salesforce.com. He was Co-founder and Chairman of Global Business Network (GBN).

Copies of Water: Asia's New Battleground and Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis will be available for purchase and signing!

Promotional co-sponsors: The Asia Foundation, East Meets West, Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley, Japan Policy Research Institute, Pacific Institute, Sierra Club, US China Green Energy Council, World Affairs Council

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Program Agenda:

5:30-6:00 pm: Registration
6:00-7:30 pm: Discussion and Audience Q&A
7:30-8:00 pm: Reception and Book Signing

EVENT DETAILS

5 June 2013

6:00pm - 7:30pm

Asia Society
Bechtel Conference Room
500 Washington St.
San Francisco

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$10 Asia Society/Co-sponsor members/students; $15 non-members

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Karez: Channeling the current

IUCN's Water and Nature initiative in Baluchistan, Pakistan

Climate Change and Water Security

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released alarming data on the consequences of global warming in some of the world’s poorest regions. By 2100, one billion to three billion people worldwide are expected to suffer from water scarcity. Global warming will increase evaporation and severely reduce rainfalls – by up to 20% in the Middle East and North Africa – with the amount of water available per person possibly halved by mid-century in these regions.

This sudden scarcity of an element whose symbolic and spiritual importance matches its centrality to human life will cause stress and exacerbate conflicts worldwide. Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia will be the first to be exposed. The repercussions, however, will be global.

Yet this bleak picture is neither an excuse for apathy nor grounds for pessimism. Conflicts may be inevitable; wars are not. Our ability to prevent “water wars” will depend on our collective capacity to anticipate tensions, and to find the technical and institutional solutions to manage emerging conflicts. The good news is that such solutions exist, and are proving their efficacy everyday.

Dams – provided they are adequately sized and designed – can contribute to human development by fighting climate change and regulating water supply. Yet in a new context of scarcity, upstream infrastructure projects on international rivers may impact water quality or availability for neighboring states, thus causing tensions.

River basin organizations such as that established for the Nile, Niger, or Senegal rivers help facilitate dialogue between states that share hydraulic resources. By developing a joint vision for the development of international waterways, these regional cooperation initiatives work towards common ownership of the resource, thereby reducing the risk that disputes over water use will escalate into violence.

Most international waterways have such frameworks for dialogue, albeit at different stages of development and levels of achievement. If we are to take climate change predictions seriously, the international community should strengthen these initiatives. Where they do not exist, they should be created in partnership with all the countries concerned. Official development assistance can create incentives to cooperate by financing data-collection, providing technical know-how, or, indeed, by conditioning loans on constructive negotiations.

Yet international water conflicts are only one side of the coin. The most violent water wars take place today within rather than among states. A dearth of water fuels ethnic strife, as communities begin to fear for their survival and seek to capture the resource. In Darfur, recurrent drought has poisoned relations between farmers and nomadic herdsmen, and the war we are helplessly witnessing today follows years of escalating conflict. Chad risks falling prey to the same cycle of violence. More

 

Water and Food Facts for World Water Day

March 22 is World Water Day, and its theme this year—water and food security—couldn’t be more pressing. But what do we really know about water—where it goes, what it’s used for, and how to preserve it? Here are a few water facts to get people thinking about what the “food and water crisis” really means, and how we can begin to change things.

Consumption

India, China and the United States together account for about one-third of the water extracted each year globally.

Over 90 percent of the water consumed globally by humans is used for agriculture.

Irrigation and Groundwater

Only 16 percent of world’s cropland is irrigated. But because irrigated land is more than twice as productive, that land accounts for 36 percent of the food we harvest.

To meet the constant demand for irrigation, countries are increasingly using more and more non-renewable groundwater. According to the United Nations, groundwater extraction has tripled in the last half century. India and China’s use of groundwater grew the most – today these countries use ten times as much groundwater as they did in 1950.

The amount of groundwater the world uses is so huge, it’s contributing to rising sea levels – as much as 25 percent of the observed amount in recent years. That means that an enormous amounts of water drawn from underground aquifers is never replaced. Or as Duke University’s Bill Chameides puts it, “Mankind is moving buckets and buckets of water from land to the ocean.”

The amount of groundwater the world uses is so huge that it’s also changing local climates, and it may bemasking the effects of global warming, according to research published in Climate Dynamics. This masking effect is most striking over North America, India, the Middle East and East Asia.

Pumping groundwater consumes enormous amounts of energy. In India, approximately one-fifth of the nation’s total electricity consumption goes toward pumping groundwater for irrigation. In the most important food producing areas, that number is much higher.

Virtual Water

Almost everything we do—from growing food, to making clothes and computers and automobiles, to generating electricity requires water. “Virtual water” refers to the amount of water it takes to produce and transport a commodity. Check your own water footprint here.

Many water-stressed nations are today virtual water exporters. India is the largest net exporter of virtual water.

Climate Change and the Future

According to the OECD, by 2030 almost half of the world’s population will be living under severe water stress.

Globally, heat waves and extreme drought could increase under climate change. The impact will be worse in some areas. According to research by Lamont-Doherty scientists at the Earth Institute, by mid-century dustbowl conditions seen in the 1930s will become the new norm for the southwestern United States.

Water stress threatens the grid. Conventional powerplants – hydroelectric, coal-fired, gas fired and nuclear—require tremendous volumes of water to run, accounting for 50 percent of water withdrawals in the United States. According to a study for the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, the convergence of population growth, rising demand and drought could cause huge water shortages and force powerplant shutdowns.

What You Can Do

Think about diet. The amount of water it takes to produce different kinds of food various tremendously. The water footprint of beef is particularly egregious, consuming anywhere from 2500 to 5000 gallons of water per pound. Consider cutting back, or switching to grass-fed beef, which has a significantly lower water footprint. More

 

 

Towards Water Security

Water comes in bottles, pours out of skies and faucets and laps at the sand on beaches, covering more than two-thirds of the planet. A recent study also pointed out that the amount of land ice lost annually from glaciers and ice caps is enough to make the global sea level rise by half an inch. Unfortunately the sheer volume of water around is not the kind of water needed to perform tasks such as cleaning, cooking and helping crops grow, much less the water needed for use by industry or as an energy source.

To help alleviate water shortage concerns, many researchers are working on developing crops that are tolerant of drought or salt, and seeds that use water more efficiently. Water security itself was one of the topics discussed at the recent 14th Asian Security Conference in New Delhi.

In his speech to the conference attendees on Feb. 13, the Indian defense minister was quoted as saying that, “Water is actually fast emerging as a major source of insecurity and a potential issue for conflict among nations. Thus, nations need to cooperate on sharing water and efficient water usage and harvesting and initiate collective action for preserving our common environment.”

One method of tracking water usage to more efficiently use this resource came from a report released the same week as the Asian security conference. Engineers from the Netherlands calculated the water usage in every country between 1996 and 2005. To measure what they called the “water footprint of humanity,” they considered how much water is being used in the home, in agriculture and in industry, and factored in each country’s use of rainwater, which they referred to as “green” water, groundwater and surface water, which they called “blue” water, and polluted or “gray” water. More

 

Melting Glaciers: What You Need To Know

 If you haven’t already, take a look at this eye-opening blog post about an expedition into the mountains of Nepal. For people in the region, climate change isn’t just an abstract worry; they live with a real and everyday concern about dangerous flash floods that can result from melting glaciers.

Sadly, this is a danger that won’t go away soon. Glaciers all over the world areshrinking. This sustained ice loss is both a natural indicator that the world is warmingand a warning that local communities are at risk. For people inland, melting glaciers can mean flash floods, landslides and reduced drinking water. For people on the coast, melting glaciers mean rising seas.

We’re learning more about glacial retreat all the time. Recently, a new study was released that received a great deal of media attention. It found that mountain glaciers and polar ice 

sheets lost more than 530 gigatons of ice per year from 2003 to 2010, raising average global sea levels more than 1 centimeter. This study is consistent with other estimates of the contribution of land ice to sea level rise. In other words, not that surprising. More

 

World Water: Get the facts

Get the Facts

• According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 1.7 billion people still lack access to clean water. 2.3 billion people suffer from water-borne diseases each year.
  
• While the demand for water is on the rise, the supply is shrinking. Water-intensive agriculture, population growth, industrial pollution, breakneck development and other ecological threats are depleting freshwater supplies.
  
• The World Bank and other dominant international financial institutions condition their loans on privatization and increased cost recovery – which often requires charging water fees from those who make less than $2 per day.
  
• The result of privatization in numerous countries has been disastrous – less access to water for the poor, extremely high tariffs, and poor water quality.

Food & Water Watch works with coalition partners in communities around the world that are facing the privatization of water. Our goal is to defend water as a public resource, to ensure access to safe and affordable water, to help to build a strong coalition against privatization, and to promote the recognition of the right to water internationally. More

Afghans' dire need for clean water