Over at Circle of Blue WaterNews, we’re reporting today on another ingredient to consider in the context of the China-Tibet conflict. Keith Schneider and C.T. Pope write that the Tibetan Plateau’s vast reserves of glacial freshwater, which supply Asia’s most populous regions, are both at risk and are emerging as an issue in the increasingly tense political and cultural strife between China and Tibet.

“At least 500 million people in Asia and 250 million people in China are at risk from declining glacial flows on the Tibetan Plateau,” Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, told me last week. “This is one of the great concerns — a staggering number of people will be affected in the near future. There aren’t too many researchers who have looked at this water situation and its far-reaching impacts.”

As we’ve heard many times, the UN estimates that two-thirds of the world’s population will live in areas of water stress within the next 20 years. By the numbers, much of that population is in Asia.

With more than a quarter of its land classified as desert, China has long sought Tibet’s water resources. Yet the IPCC and others warn that the Himalayan glaciers are receding faster than anywhere in the world and could vanish within three decades.

Said Geoff Dabelko, director of the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., “Nearly two billion people are in some way dependent on water originating on the Tibetan Plateau. By definition, that makes it high politics and critically important in a politically strategic sense.”

Hear the full interview with Dr. Dabelko on Huffington Post, as well as excerpts from the latest Journal of International Affairs, which illuminates water’s role in transboundary cooperation and conflict resolution.

On the Tibetan Plateau, where a whim of nature created the highest points on Earth, many of the world’s major rivers are born. Each day their flows bring life to more than a billion people downstream in Asia, the planet’s most populous region.

As we watch the headlines in an age of shifting water supplies, we may see a future filled with conflict and war over water resources, flows and quality.

Prayer flags and khatags, Tibetan ceremonial silk scarves, fly over the wide Yarlung Tsangpo River in central Tibet’s U-Tsang region. It is the highest major river in the world. Photo: Alison Domzalski

For example, we report today at Circle of Blue’s WaterNews the water-strategic importance of the Tibetan Plateau. It doesn’t take much to imagine the stress and potential for conflict downstream, particularly with China’s propensity for hydrological engineering.

However, flip the perspective 180 degrees and we may have seeds for some of the greatest collaborations and cooperative opportunities in history. This according to an essay by Karin Bencala and Dr. Geoffrey Dabelko published Tuesday in the Journal of International Affairs.

In the Middle East, for example, “Water and sanitation investments are pitched as providing peace dividends,” according to the essay, Water Wars: Obscuring Opportunities. Dabelko directs the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Environmental Change and Security Program; Bencala is program assistant.

True, the planet’s water challenges are great, the situation grim. As Circle of Blue reported last year, drought and poor water management are spurring immigration to the United States from Mexican agrarian communities. Similarly, Inner Mongolian herders face desertification and relocation, and as glaciers retreat, Peruvian pastoralists are forced to move to the city with few urban survival skills. The health statistics are even more numbing: nearly 2 million children die each year from water-related diseases.

Write Bencala and Dabelko:

“Scholars from a variety of disciplines would likely argue the world is entering a level of water stress it has never previously experienced, driven by population growth, increased consumption of goods and resources and climate change. But it is less the absolute scarcity of water and more the rate of change in water availability that should raise concerns about future transboundary water conflict. Water stress alone is unlikely to lead to an international conflict, as all conflicts have multiple origins. Instead, most disputes occur when a unilateral action is taken, such as building a dam or diverting water, and when there is not sufficient institutional support or flexibility for conflict resolution or mitigation. Abrupt climate change or the sudden creation of new countries without developed patterns of water relations could also similarly occur at a rapid rate to which institutions cannot adapt.”

…

“While increased scarcity could lead to conflict, this scarcity also provides opportunities to shape a cooperative future. If addressed early on, issues of water scarcity and water use can bring parties together to jointly manage resources for purposes as diverse as water quality and hydroelectricity.”

In parallel, Bencala and Dabelko point out, water supplies and meteorological patterns can be indicators for potential conflict, and offer opportunities to generate proactive peacemaking.

According to analysis conducted in 2005 by Marc Levy, Charles Vorosmarty and Nils Petter Gleditsch: “…at the global scale, there is a highly significant relationship between rainfall deviations and the likelihood of outbreak of a high-intensity internal war. When rainfall is significantly below normal, the likelihood of conflict outbreak is significantly elevated.”

Dr. Vorosmarty and I co-presented the session on water at the Aspen Environment Forum in March. During our session, he noted with irony that as we face these great challenges, we are in many cases allowing our global water monitoring capabilities to decline. This becomes particularly notable as comprehensive monitoring and research could offer indicators — a kind of early warning system — for proactive response to potential hot spots, and turn them into peacemaking opportunities.

It’s precisely water’s unpredictablity — combined with the speed of political and environmental change, and the prevalence of bombastic commentary — that encourage quick judgments and poor investments, explain Bencala and Dabelko.

“Growing water scarcity and climate change-derived unpredictability may motivate countries to fight over water. Yet the world community would be wise to resist the dramatic headlines of water wars. Conditions are dire, but this disproportionate focus on states fighting over water gets in the way of understanding the complexities of conflict over water. It also obscures the positive opportunities presented by cooperation over water. Academic inquiries, policies and program designs that ignore these differentiations misdiagnose causes of conflicts, skew risk assessments and prescribe inappropriate means to address the problems.”

Is there hope? Bencala and Dabelko propose that we take proactive, collaborative approaches that avoid the pitfalls of bad policy and the 24-7 news cycle, which so often ignore long-term, slow-to-develop solutions.

“To move in a positive direction, politicians, advocates and the media need to stop predicting water wars and instead begin to call for water cooperation. International policy will follow, affecting how money is spent on the ground. As (U.N. Secretary General) Ban Ki-moon counseled at (the World Economic Forum in) Davos, “We need to adapt to this reality just as we do to climate change. There is still enough water for all of us, but only so long as we keep it clean, use it wisely, and share it fairly.”

That’s the rub. Politicians, advocates and the media — and most of us — are driven by crises, not slow fuses. China and Tibet may be in the hot seat, and most don’t predict an easy resolution to tension and strife anytime soon. Yet water management decisions on the Tibetan Plateau will affect billions of people for generations. China and Tibet are are not alone: any number of regions, from Israel to Mexico to the United States to Peru to Sub-Saharan Africa, are struggling with water scarcity. In each case, perhaps those dark clouds can bring a gentle rain and nurture the seeds of peace.

Let me indulge in some timely self promotion for my colleagues at Circle of Blue, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars China Environment Forum and the Pacific Institute. The Circle of Blue team, which I direct, publishes today its compelling multimedia report, “Reign of Sand,” about the water crisis in Inner Mongolia, China. The multimedia package comes as China’s spring dust storms approach. Scientists say the severity and frequency of the dust storms reflect worsening conditions, including: dryer climate, stronger winds, water shortages, over-grazing, population growth, and a clash between nomadic herders and the government over range and farmland management.

We’ve said before in this space that it will take powerful narratives and an informed public to respond to these unfolding crises. Take a look and be sure to click to suggest your story ideas, where we should send a team of reporters and why.

Nearly three years ago, I was part of a group of journalists convened by the Aspen Institute to address climate change and why, at the time, it was so hard to look at ourselves in the mirror and admit that we had a problem. Why do we deconstruct complicated science and politics into oversimplified “he said, she said” dictations? we asked ourselves. All this while there were powerful dramas unfolding, from human migration to conflagrations of political careers. And why weren’t we doing the in-depth reporting necessary to tease out the nuances — and sweeping impacts — that climate will have on all facets of the news, from international diplomacy to lifestyle? It’s a complicated issue, we agreed, that required comprehensive, all-hands-on-deck coverage. Crucial, relevant reporting that needed the talents of every staff member in the newsroom.

We left the three-day session with a resolution to tackle climate head-on with seriousness and depth, and not hide behind excuses that the issue was too complicated, boring or politically belittled. We resolved to identify the spinmeisters and shine light on their motives. And we pledged more resources to cover climate with voracity. (See our report, Slow Fuse: Journalistic Responses to Climate Change)

The water crisis is proving to be equally complex, even more so. While it’s skipped the political hot potato stage, it’s knocking at our front door and few are listening. And the mainstream news media has been rendered incapable of answering. The depth, the vision, the resources, the patience no longer exist in our 20th-century newsrooms that are necessary to frame this extensive restructuring of the water supply on every corner of the planet.

I had coffee the other day with a leading climate and water expert in Washington who was worried that the recent attention to climate — although long awaited — would steal the thunder from the equally urgent (many argue, more urgent) crises of water. Here we have a complicated challenge that has a relevancy to everyone — from dying children in Africa to drying lake beds in Mongolia to forthcoming water rationing in Atlanta to pollution in the Great Lakes that are the water supply for the Midwest. Yet we can’t seem to muster political will for coordinated response.

Take this excerpt from Tuesday’s New York Times about the drought in Atlanta:

Others wondered why the calls to conserve came so late.
“I think there’s been an ostrich-head-in-the-sand syndrome that has been growing,” said Mark Crisp, an Atlanta-based consultant with the engineering firm C. H. Guernsey. “Because we seem to have been very, very slow in our actions to deal with an impending crisis.”

And this commentary from Melbourne, Australia:

There are alternatives to our wasteful use of water

Melbourne, Australia

John Langford

October 3, 2007

Climate change is happening more rapidly than expected and its effect on water resources seems to have caught everyone by surprise so that many of the water management plans we made only 12 months ago are now obsolete. Static plans are no longer adequate. We need dynamic planning.
Scientists seek 99 per cent probability before making links between events such as this drought and climate change. However, water managers must operate on a much lower burden of proof, as the risks are simply too great. We cannot run a city low on water while we sit around waiting for it to rain.

So here’s the Big Story of the century unfolding before our eyes and we still can’t make the connections. Most of us seem unwilling — or incapable — of grasping the gravity and intersections of the larger story. And as that slow fuse burns on this 35th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, our equitable, reasoned responses evaporate by the day.

Resources

The World’s Water - Pacific Institute

Silent Tsunami: The Urgent Need for Clean Water and Sanitation