Transboundary Issues: Where Are All the Water Wars?
Wendy Barnaby has an excellent piece in last week’s Nature (free for now, behind the paywall soon) challenging the conventional wisdom that wars of scarce water supplies are a likely result of the collision between population growth, aridity and climate change.
Barnaby had set out to write a book about water wars. But the more research she did, the more she realized they didn’t happen. Why is that? Her answer seems straightforward and persuasive: Water shortages show up in their most extreme form as a shortage of water needed to grow food. Nations that cannot grow all their own food import it from elsewhere. Conflict over a lack of water, she found, is routinely addressed by nations through food imports rather than going to war
