Water Disputes

1.5 Water Disputes

Emily Wax of The Washington Post writes

In Somalia, a well is as precious as a town bank, controlled by warlords and guarded with weapons. During the region’s relentless three-year drought, water has become a resource worth fighting and dying over. The drought has affected an estimated 11 million people across East Africa and killed large numbers of livestock, leaving carcasses of cows, goats and even hearty camels rotting in the sun. The governments of Kenya and Ethiopia have mediated dozens of conflicts over water in their countries, even sending in police and the army to quell disputes around wells. The effects of the drought are most pronounced in Somalia, which has lacked an effective government and central planning, including irrigation projects, since the government of Mohamed Siad Barre collapsed in 1991. Since then, a hodgepodge of warlords and their armies have taken control of informal taxation systems, crops, markets and access to water. (Wax, 2006)

Unfortunately, violent disputes over water like these are as old as human history. As pointed out by Priscolli (1998), the Book of Genesis describes struggles over water wells in the Negev with the Philistines. Herodotus describes how Persian towns were subdued by filling their wells and water supply tunnels. Saladin was able to defeat the Crusaders at the Horns of Hattin in 1187 by denying them access to water. More recently, we have seen irrigation systems and hydroelectric facilities bombed in warfare. During the Gulf war, desalinization plants and water distribution systems were targeted; and the list goes on.

Arguably, however, it seems that various peoples and countries throughout the his- tory have learned to appreciate the right for water as a basic human right, almost transcen- dent to life itself. FAO has identified more than 3600 treaties related to nonnavigational water use between years 805 and 1984. Since 1945, approximately 300 treaties dealing with water management or allocations in international basins have been negotiated. None of the various and extensive databases on causes of war can turn up water as a casus belli. Even in the highly charged Middle East, perhaps the world’s most prominent meeting place for high politics and high water tension, arguably only one incident can

be pointed to where water was the cause of conflict (Priscolli, 1998). Nevertheless, water scarcity and poor water quality have the potential to destabilize isolated regions within countries, whole countries, or entire regions sharing limited sources of water. There is an increasing likelihood of social strife and even armed conflict resulting from the pressures of water scarcity and mismanagement (CSIS and Sandia Environmental Laboratories, 2005).

Water disputes internal to a country are not reserved just for the Third World, or un- developed and developing countries. Even the most developed nations are increasingly witnessing various forms of water disputes involving both water quantity and quality. Over 30 years ago, Smith (1985) warns about the competition for freshwater between individual states of the United States and the related legal consequences:

The role of the federal government in groundwater regulation is likely to increase over the next few decades. A combination of events—including recent federal court decisions, past federal intervention in state groundwater utilization, the public pronouncements by a variety of federal actors, and in- creasing concern over the inability of states to control overdrafting—all suggest that the federal role in groundwater management may be increasing. These events are examined here, and it is argued that, without change in state groundwater management practices to mitigate the negative effects of state competition for groundwater, federal intervention in groundwater management seems likely.

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The practices that followed indeed confirmed these words. Just recently, the federal government intervened in the case of the Colorado River water utilization in the west by reducing the ongoing overwithdrawal by California to its allocated portion. It has been instrumental in mediating disputes between Georgia, Alabama, and Florida caused by decreases in surface water flows due to the exploding water supply needs of Atlanta, or decreases of river base flows due to groundwater withdrawals in southern Georgia. Nevertheless, as reported by the Washington Post on October 21, 2007 (National News, p. A15):

With water supplies rapidly shrinking during a drought of historic proportions, Gov. Sonny Perdue (R) declared a state of emergency for the northern third of Georgia and asked President Bush to declare it a major disaster area. Perdue asked the president to exempt Georgia from complying with federal regulations that dictate amount of water to be released from Georgia’s reservoirs to protect federally protected mussel species downstream. On Friday, Perdue’s office asked a federal judge to force the Army Corps of Engineers to curb the amount of water it drains from Georgia reservoirs into streams in Alabama and Florida.

Likely in response to this action by the Georgia governor, the federal government reacted by organizing the highest-level meeting between the three states, as reported by Associated Press from Washington, DC:

Three Southeastern governors who are in Washington to lobby for water rights amid a potentially catastrophic drought are likely to put the Bush administration on the spot. If the administration decides to bolster Georgia’s drinking supply, Alabama and Florida may claim it’s crippling their economies to satisfy uncontrolled growth around Atlanta. If it continues releasing water downstream to Alabama and Florida, Georgia could argue that one of the nation’s largest cities is being hung out to dry.

“If it were easy it would have been solved 18 years ago,” Kempthorne said. “There have been good-faith efforts, but there’s also been millions of dollars spent in the courts and we do not have a solution. . . . There needs to be something where everyone says we gained here while we know we may have had to give up something else.”

Georgia officials have argued that the corps is turning a blind eye to a potential humanitarian crisis in Atlanta by ignoring warnings that the city’s main water source, Lake Lanier, could have just a few months’ worth of water remaining. The state sued the corps last month, arguing that Georgia has sacrificed more than other states and that the federal government is putting mussels before people.

Alabama Gov. Bob Riley accused Georgians last week of “watering their lawns and flowers” all summer and expecting Washington to “bail them out.” Florida Gov. Charlie Crist wrote Bush to say his state was “unwilling to allow the unrealistic demands of one region to further compromise the downstream communities.”

At a speech in Montgomery on Tuesday, Riley held up a poster-size map of Alabama and Georgia and showed that the exceptional drought area in Alabama is much larger than in Georgia. He said the state’s economic prosperity was at stake. “This is about whether Alabama gets its fair share and whether we are going to have to lay off people in Alabama,” he said.”

According to the National Drought Mitigation Center, almost a third of the Southeast is covered by an exceptional drought, the worst category. (CNNPolitics.com, 2007)

The government has also been active in mediating disputes between Georgia and South Carolina arising from saltwater intrusion at Hilton Head Island due to aquifer overpumping in the Savannah area. These are just some of the examples of the increas- ing frequency of government involvement in water disputes at various levels. More on regulations and legal framework for groundwater management in the United States is presented in Chapter 8.

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In 1994, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) established a strategic framework for water industry reform to ensure the efficient and sustainable use of Aus- tralia’s water resources, and to use integrated and consistent approaches to water man- agement. The framework emphasizes environmental flows, water quality, integrated watershed (catchment) management, water trading and pricing, viable and sustainable water use, and separation of responsibility for service delivery from regulation (Envi- ronment Australia, 2000).

Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin Commission, established in 1985 following one of the worst droughts in Australian modern history, is an example of interstate cooperation in managing water resources on a large watershed basis. The Murray–Darling Basin pro- duces 40 percent of Australian agricultural products and uses 75 percent of Australia’s irrigation water. Because of increasing water extraction, which resulted in diminishing river flows, a moratorium on growth in water use was introduced in 1995 to ensure the reliability of supply while protecting environmental flows. This was confirmed as a per- manent Cap on Diversions in 1997, but its implementation across four states, one territory and many industries continues to provide serious management challenges (Environment Australia, 2000).

In the spring of 2007, as the worst-ever, multiyear drought in Australia continued, the Commission acknowledged an overallocation of water resources and instructed fur- ther implementation of contingency measures and emergency planning (Murray-Darling Basin Commission, 2007). These measures, in some cases referred to as “severe,” are rais- ing tensions between upstream and downstream users, as well as between farmers, urban centers, and industry. As often in similar situations, the environmental users seem to be shortchanged first—the Commission has approved disconnecting flows to several wet- lands in order to reduce evaporative water losses. Still more controversial is the decision by some state governments to give priority to urban users over irrigation and livestock farming. This has been reported extensively by major news media around the globe, such as BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation): “the New South Wales government actually took away water from the farmers which they’d already paid for, to cope with a shortfall in the cities. Eventually, it offered compensation, but only a third of the price paid by the farmers.”

“Robbery,” says Andrew Tully. “When the government comes in and steals your irrigation water that you have legally stored away as part of a good drought management strategy, that really makes you lose confidence in the whole system. It’s pretty gutless.” (Bryant, BBC, 2007).

Another growing source of conflicts over water resources is caused by a skyrock- eting demand for bottled water worldwide. Multinational beverage and water bottling companies are facing many challenges from local communities, which are protecting groundwater resources, and resisting withdrawal by the “newcomers.” An illustrative example is an outcry in India over the operations of the Coca-Cola Company, including lawsuits at a state court and the Supreme Court of India. In efforts to mitigate these and other possible negative actions worldwide, the company has elevated the strategic priority of water in its operations and the surrounding communities (Sandia National Laboratories, 2005; from Reilly and Babbit, 2005). It has surveyed 850 facilities in more than 200 countries to document and consider water issues and has begun working with conservation groups to address watershed management options around the globe. All of this serves to maintain the image of Coca-Cola as well as build rapport with local com- munities. Such strategies are increasingly adopted by corporations involved in the water

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industry, as the backlash against globalization and multinational corporations continue in many parts of the world (Sandia National Laboratories, 2005).

Cooperation in management of transboundary (internationally shared) surface wa- ters, based on available international law and hydraulic engineering, is evident on all continents. However, the hidden nature of transboundary groundwater and lack of legal frameworks invites misunderstandings by many policymakers. Not surprisingly, trans- boundary aquifer management is still in its infancy since its evaluation is difficult, and it suffers from a lack of institutional will as well as finances to collect the necessary in- formation. Although there are reliable estimates of the resources of rivers shared by two or more countries, no such estimates exist for transboundary aquifers (Salman, 1999). Unlike transboundary surface water and river basins, transboundary aquifers are not well known to policymakers. Present international law does not adequately address the issues concerning spatial flow of groundwater and has limited application in conditions where impacts from neighboring countries can be slow to develop (Puri, 2001).

After a clear consensus for an international initiative on shared groundwater re- sources was reached among groundwater professionals, the International Association of Hydrogeologists (IAH) established a commission to investigate the issue in 1999. Activ- ities of the commission, over the next several years, resulted in the establishment of an international program supported by UNESCO, FAO, and UNECE (United Nations Eco- nomic Commission for Europe). One of the main drivers of the program, named the Inter- nationally Shared/Transboundary Aquifer Resources Management (ISARM or TARM), is to support cooperation among countries so as to develop their scientific knowledge and to eliminate potential for conflict, particularly where conceptual differences might create tensions. It aims to train, educate, inform, and provide input for policies and decision making, based on good technical and scientific understanding (Puri, 2001).