The struggle for oil and gas resources that became so intensely debated in the previous years of the price boom, has overshadowed the aggravating problem of shortages of other natural resources, including water. In the meantime, the situation around it is fraught with various conflicts already in the medium term.

THE EARTH’S WATER PROBLEMS

Mere 2.5 percent of all water reserves on the planet is good for human consumption, and even this amount is distributed irregularly. At the end of 2006, as many as 80 countries that are home to 40 percent of the Earth’s population said they were experiencing a shortage of water. While the averaged distribution of water resources on the planet stands at 7,500 cubic meters per capita, the ratio for Europe is only 4,700 cubic meters and for Asia, as little as 3,400 cubic meters. Consumption of water per capita differs largely even in developed countries, and the gap between Europe and the U.S. measures several hundred percent. The UN assesses the annual shortage of fresh water at 230 billion cubic meters, saying that the figure is likely to increase to 1,300 to 2,000 billion cubic meters by 2025. And some estimates indicate that up to two-thirds of people on the planet will feel the deficit in some 25 years from now.

About 6 million hectares of the land surface of the Earth turn into desert every year, and unsatisfactory hygienic conditions caused by the deficit of water result in the death of about 6,000 people a day. Anthropogenic activity has overstepped the sustainability limits of natural ecosystems, which now only serve to satisfy man’s everyday needs and do not have the properties of natural objects anymore.

The quality of water is degrading, too. Each year, humankind takes away 160 billion cubic meters of potable water from subterranean reserves and drops up to 95 percent of liquid industrial waste into water basins in the absence of whatever control. Acid rains have become a regular fact of life in many countries. If contamination gets irreversible, water may turn into a non-reproducible resource.

The UN set up the UN-Water Secretariat in 1978. It declared 2003 to be the Year of Freshwater and the period from 2005 through 2015, the Decade of Freshwater. Drinking water supplies to urban population rose 2 percent during the first International Decade of Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation in the 1980s. This time the number of people experiencing the shortage of freshwater is planned to be reduced by half.

The problem, however, is that about 50 percent of regions get water from river basins belonging to two or more countries, which sometimes do not stop short of blaming the water deficit on neighbors. Given the situation, imposition of control over water resources becomes a source of international conflicts increasingly frequently, all the more so if the neighbors have had a record of past conflicts or one of them can block the water supply. Extremist and criminal groups, too, throw their shoulder into the strife for the vital sources, especially where the government is corrupt or showings of a failed state are present.

Yet the spectrum of problems of water resource utilization that are related to national and international security is much broader and they can stand a review only if they are addressed comprehensively.

Depriving an enemy of water supplies is a time-tested method of destroying him in the course of a military conflict. It involves putting up dams, filling water wells with dirt or contaminating them. Sources of water get into the focal point of fighting in desert areas. It is not accidental, for instance, that the Georgian authorities slashed water supplies to Tskhinval practically every time the conflict with the unrecognized Republic of South Ossetia surged.

Vulnerable developed societies have to take account of the possible destruction of hydraulic engineering installations and its catastrophic aftermath as they plan antiterrorist operations. Several decades ago, German sociologist and jurist Carl Schmitt wrote that he could well imagine a demolitionist coming to his native Sauerland under the guise of a pediatrician, going to the nearest hill and destroying from there all the dams blocking the floodplains of rivers in the locality and adjoining areas. As a result of this, the entire Ruhr area would transform into marshland.

Russian security services averted an extremist attempt in November 2006 to carry out a chain of explosions at hydraulic engineering facilities in southern Russia. “A subversive act at any of them may bring about disastrous aftereffects, including a paralysis of life in a whole area, a huge loss of human lives, and grave economic losses,” FSB director Nikolai Patrushev said then.

WILL NATIONS WAGE WARS FOR WATER?

In all probability, even the first ever conflicts between political subjects of human society were waged for rivers and sources of water. Recall the Sumerian civilization that evidenced an acute strife for the right to use the waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates in Mesopotamia some 2,500 years BC.

Today, many experts share an opinion that the era of anti-terrorist struggle will be followed by decades of armed conflicts for resources and water will turn into a major object for the brawling powers. The loudest sounds of alarm are coming from the expert community and politicians in the West, while Russia has not aired any competent position yet.

In 1995, Ismail Serageldin, the then Vice President of the World Bank, voiced a conviction that wars of the future would be fought not for crude oil but for water. British Defense Secretary John Reid said at a summit on climate change in 2006 that violence and political conflicts would grow ever more realistic as long as water basins turned into deserts, glaciers continued melting, and water reservoirs got contaminated. In his opinion, the general water crisis is posing a threat to global security. In light of it, the British Army should be ready to take part in untangling armed conflicts that might erupt after the exhaustion of freshwater resources.

Reid was not the only person to make such forecasts. Michelle Alliot-Marie, then the French Defense Minister, said at much the same time that wars of the future would be the conflicts for water, energy and, possibly, foodstuffs. Her words call for special attention on the background of the foodstuff crisis that has enveloped the whole planet. Dr Hans van Ginkel, the former director of the United Nations University in Tokyo, also indicated that international and civil wars over water resources pose the risk of becoming the main element of political life in the 21st century.

Research organizations in the U.S. are increasingly often inclined to tie up hydro resources, on which stability in many petroleum-exporting countries is hinged, to energy security. Reduction of water resources pose a “serious threat” to America’s national security, the Center for Naval Analyses told the U.S. President in an April 2007 report. A group of retired admirals and generals warned the country’s leadership that a time would come when Washington would find itself enmeshed in a chain of harsh wars for water. Experts close to the Bush administration voiced equally categorical assessments: “Water issues are critical to U.S. national security and integral to upholding American values of humanitarianism and democratic development.”

The U.S. is reluctant to watch idly the deterioration of the situation on the global scale and hence it is getting ready to unilaterally manage – with the aid of armaments – the water reservoirs that have been co-owned with neighbors. In 2006, the Administration made public its intentions to place patrols armed with submachine-guns on gunboats for guarding the shores of the Great Lakes that are getting contaminated at a menacing rate and continue going shallow due to a huge growth of the population and industries around them. The Americans have built 34 firing ranges along the Lakes shoreline for training and have held numerous combat drills there.

WATER AS AN INSTRUMENT OF POLITICS

Water can be used as a powerful instrument for enforcing national interests. This is what China and some other countries do. However, the most pragmatic and rationalistic utilization of hydro resources, as well as the natural/geographic situation, has been displayed by Turkey.

That country has impressive experience in selling big amounts of potable water, and it is not only the commercial aspect of the activity that presents special interest. The Turkish authorities intensively use the ‘aquatic levers’ for exerting political influence on neighbors. It squeezes maximum benefit from the fact that the upper reaches of both the Tigris and the Euphrates are found on Turkey’s territory. By 2010, the Turks plan building 22 dams, as well as hydro stations and water reservoirs there.

Since countries located in the Tigris/Euphrates basin have low rainfall, they have to resort to artificial irrigation of lands, and if Ankara’s plans materialize, the amounts of water getting to Syria and Iraq, both of them located downstream, will shrink considerably. Turkey will get an opportunity to meter water out to its neighbors and the amounts they will get will depend on their pliability.

Incidentally, the Turks resorted to pressuring Saddam Hussein – upon an agreement with Syria – with the aid of stream flow restrictions in 1990 and 1991, shortly before the first Gulf War.
Ankara uses water for influencing Syria, too. In 1987, the two countries signed an agreement regulating the problems of water supplies. Turkey then set forth a condition – that Syria renounce support for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Emblematically enough, the Turks are building new hydro installations right in the places populated by the Kurds struggling to create an independent statehood.

Turkish supplies of water to Israel deserve notice, too. The countries signed an agreement in August 2002 for deliveries of 50 million cubic meters of water a year, which accounts for only 3 percent of Israel’s annual need for water. The sides chose to deliver water by pipeline, which is more expensive than deliveries by tankers. The capacity of the pipeline is greater than the initially conceived shipments by tankers by a factor of four to six. On the other hand, this will be much more expensive than the construction of seawater desalting plants on the Israeli territory. And the production costs of desalted seawater are much smaller than the price of Turkish water.

The get clarity around this situation, we must take account of the political – rather than economic – significance of this agreement. Turkey has become a strategic partner for Israel in recent years and they have signed an agreement on expanding cooperation in the field of security. Quite possibly, the prospects for selling Israeli weaponry to Turkey depended on the signing of the water supply agreement. Yosef Paritzky, the then Israeli Minister of National Infrastructure, said unambiguously during a discussion of the project that Israel was interested in far from water only. This means that Ankara made pumping the water by pipeline a condition for expanding cooperation in defense technologies.

CONFLICT POTENTIAL IN CENTRAL ASIA AND CHINA

Conflicts of various intensity over fresh water exist on all continents. Let us concentrate on the situation shaping in the vicinity of Russia, namely, in Central Asia and China.
Incidents related to water would occur in Central Asia even back in the Soviet era, but the authorities succeeded in containing them then. Today the situation keeps getting worse for a number of reasons, and it is expected that the region will lose about a third of its water reserves within 15 to 20 years.

First, the region is facing climate change. Drought has been suffocating the once super-fertile Fergana Valley, and western regions of Uzbekistan have become waterless.

Second, the anthropogenic pressure on the ecosystem continues growing. The region has high rates of population growth and it is experiencing a deficit of food, which rules out a slashing of land areas under crops. Meanwhile, land in the region is irrigated by archaic methods as water flows down primitive irrigation ditches. As a result, the growing of crops takes several times more water than up-to-date technologies would require.

The story of the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth largest lake abounding in fish, offers an especially graphic and pitiable example. The ‘cold war’ that nations of the region have been leading over freshwater resources of the rivers Amu Darya and Syr Darya, the sea’s tributaries, has wiped out more than a half of the Aral Sea’s water area within five decades.

Third, relations between countries as regards the use of water resources remain unregulated.

The sharpest contradictions arise over water from the Toktogul reservoir in Kyrgyzstan, which contains about 40 percent of all freshwater reserves in the region. Kyrgyzstan itself does not need more than 10 percent of the annual flow of water but financial shortfalls have forced the country to use electricity for heating for the last few years. Electricity is produced by local hydro plants. As a result, the winter discharge of water is bigger than neighboring Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan need, while in the summertime the flow of water is restricted, although the demand for water at that time of year is much greater.

Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have signed a framework agreement on the use of hydro resources of the Naryn-Syr Darya river basin. It envisions an annual adoption of ancillary four-partite documents, to be followed up with bilateral agreements. However, Uzbekistan has shunned their signing for a number of years.

The difference of outlooks concerning methods of solving problems with water and energy utilization in the region came into the focal point of the August 2007 summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Specifically, the presidents of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan exchanged peppery remarks regarding the Tajik government’s plans to complete the construction of the Rogun Dam, frozen for years. Uzbekistani officials have apprehensions that an overly high dam would give the other side an opportunity to regulate the stream flows that irrigate Uzbekistani valleys. Frictions between the two countries intensified, even though Tajikistan tried to allay these fears. A statement that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev made during a visit to Uzbekistan in early 2009 was interpreted by the Tajik government as support for Tashkent’s position. This triggered a diplomatic conflict with Moscow and almost brought about a cancellation of Tajikistani President Emomali Rahmon’s visit to Russia.

Back at the 2007 summit, President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan voiced a number of claims against China, as Astana has grave concerns over a number of water projects being implemented by Beijing. Nazarbayev’s fears are easy to understand if one considers the bottom position that Kazakhstan has on the list of post-Soviet countries in terms of sufficiency of freshwater.
In the meantime, the Chinese leadership is planning a speedy development of the country’s backward western regions. The construction of a canal that will siphon water from the upper reaches of the Irtysh River to the Karamay oil province plants and farmlands is drawing to an end in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The authorities also plan building up an intake of water in the upper reaches of the transborder Ili River which ensures 80 percent of the influx of water into Lake Balkhash. At present, the intake of the Ili’s waters on the Chinese territory totals 3,500 cubic meters a year and its buildup to 5,000 cubic meters will entail a shallowing and salinization of the Balkhash. Add to it that the Irtysh is the largest tributary of the Ob, one of Russia’s major rivers, and it also yields water to Lake Zaysan in Kazakhstan. The materialization of Beijing’s plans will slash the inflow of freshwater into the eastern and central regions of Kazakhstan, will put the cities of Ust-Kamenogorsk, Semipalatinsk and Pavlodar on the brink of full water deficiency, dry up the Irtysh-Karaganda canal, and will lower the water level in the Irtysh in the area of the Russian city of Omsk by 0.6 meters.

China is experiencing a shortage of good quality water supply, as 70 percent of all water there cannot be utilized even for technical purposes. The contamination of Chinese rivers with extremely hazardous waste has become a routine feature of life and industrial facilities have practically no wastewater treatment facilities. Beijing conceals the real scale of industrial accidents and disasters in most cases, thereby making it difficult for the neighbors to assess the aftermath and take adequate countermeasures. The Chinese have built hundreds of industrial facilities along the shores of the Songhua River that adjoins the Russian border. The factories do not have wastewater treatment facilities, and the Songhua’s waters get straight into the Amur. Russia has already had to bring army units into efforts to eliminate chemical slicks.

APPROACHES TO RESOLVING THE PROBLEM

Maude Barlow, the author of Blue Covenant, singles out three water crises in the world, which “pose the greatest threat of our time to the planet and to our survival:”

• dwindling freshwater supplies;
• inequitable access to water;
• and the corporate control of water.

She proposes starting with a global covenant on water that should have three components:

• a water conservation covenant from people and their governments that pledges to protect and conserve the world’s water supplies;
• a water justice covenant between those in the Global North who have water and resources and those in the Global South who do not, to work in solidarity for water justice, water for all, and local control of water;
• and a water democracy covenant among all governments acknowledging that water is a fundamental human right for all.

Governments “must also recognize that citizens of other countries have the right to water as well.”

The fact that Barlow proposes giving uninterrupted access to water in any country to the abstract “all” is disconcerting, to put it mildly. While the answer to a question who has enough water and who wants it badly is a widely known secret, her scheme does not envision compensations to the owners of water resources. Most obviously, an approach of this sort will rally many followers in a situation of mounting global struggle for freshwater. An idea that Russia’s natural resources are a heritage of the entire humankind is already being driven home to the international community today. That is, Russia’s resources should be free for use by everyone who may need them. In plain words, countries rich in freshwater – and Russia is one of them – are offered to share it with others.

Russia’s position is unique. Suffice it to recall that the 23,600 cubic kilometers of water in the Baikal make up 80 percent of Russia’s freshwater reserves and about 20 percent of global reserves. On the whole, this country possesses one-third of freshwater on the globe and is second only to Brazil. In addition, Russia’s geographic location close to countries experiencing freshwater shortages has more advantages.

One may have a wild guess about the initial conceptions of the organizers of the 5th World Water Forum that gathered in Istanbul in March 2009, but its overarching theme – “Bridging Divides for Water” – sounds ambiguous in light of the above-said. An era of love, affluence, equal opportunities, full reconciliation, and prevailing humanism will not come about soon. Reality suggests that pragmatism continues reigning in international relations, that political subjects defend national interests (most typically, at the expense of others) and that the deficit of natural resources is getting acuter, along with all of its consequences.

At any rate, Russia is heading for a moment where it will have to make a choice. One would like to hope it would be a clearly thought-out and well-prepared choice, not a spontaneous one.

IN NEED OF A WELL-CONCEIVED HYDRO POLICY

Meanwhile, is everything perfect in Russia itself? We still have many towns and villages where tap water is supplied for just several hours a day. Government officials correctly call attention to its poor quality, which has produced a number of cases of mass poisoning and outbreaks of infectious diseases in recent years. The absence of quality drinking water rules out any talk about improvements in the demographic situation, as the Russians’ health and lifespan correlate with water quality immediately.

Although Russia occupies the seventh position in the world standings for water purity, this much rather reflects the hugeness of its overall freshwater resources. The Urals, Western Siberia, and the Amur River basin are the most contaminated areas. Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s president, told a session of the country’s Security Council on January 30, 2008, that 35 to 60 percent of potable water did not meet sanitary requirements in some regions. In addition, “efforts to stop the contamination of a whole number of river basins in the European part of the country and in Siberia have proved futile, and the contamination rates are especially high near our megalopolises and big cities.” He also made reference to a heightening “trans-boundary contamination of territories […] in the basins of the Amur and the Irtysh,” thus virtually openly pointing at China. And Dmitry Medvedev said in his report that 40 percent of surface and 17 percent of subsurface water sources did not meet the sanitary norms. The session mapped out a range of measures to cope with the situation. A new Water Code that took effect January 1, 2007, is aimed to bring things into order in the sphere of water resources, too.

Russia’s efforts to save water consumption have begun to yield results, as well. For instance, an average resident of Moscow uses 280 liters of water a day now, while fairly recently he or she would use 380 liters. Yuri Trutnev, Russia’s Minister of Natural Resources, told the 5th World Water Forum that Russia has reduced water consumption per unit of the Gross National Product by almost a half in the past five years.

The situation around freshwater resources calls for an all-embracing assessment. We must figure out all the possible scenarios, including the most unfavorable ones, and get ready to offer appropriate reactions to them.

The time has come for bearing out a comprehensive, cohesive, and conceptually organized water resource policy (hydro policy) that would unite internal and external aspects. Its objectives should comprise sparing treatment and protection of existing water resources; the opening of new resources; rational use of existing water reserves; refraining from water contamination; and satisfaction of the current demand for water with account of its projected growth in the future.

Russia, a country possessing so many full-flowing rivers and water reservoirs, will unavoidably get into the epicenter of the unfolding strife over freshwater resources, and this calls for a clear-cut official position that would send unequivocal signals to our foreign partners. For this purpose, it would be reasonable to draft an independent document in the field of hydro policy. In any case, relevantly formulated ideas should become substantial elements of concepts and doctrines stipulating approaches to Russia’s development and maintenance of national security. Given the situation as it is, we must consider setting up an alliance of countries rich in hydro resources so as to coordinate resource management.

Russia needs a package of measures for protecting water resources against terrorist attacks and encroachments on the part of other political subjects. The intensifying struggle for resources occupies an increasingly more important place in the system of factors determining the contents of state policy in the fields of defense and Armed Forces construction. One should not discard scenarios involving the use of force and thus dictating the use of the Armed Forces for defending our interests in this sphere. Since the system of inland waterways ranks among the critical infrastructures, the importance of a system of data gathering and processing and the employment of scientifically grounded methods enabling a timely identification of potential threats moves to the forefront.

The antiterrorist element can be illustrated by Moscow City’s example. Owing to its status, emblematic significance and some other factors, this city has special attractiveness for terrorists.

Moscow’s water supply system provides water for some 14 million people, or 10 percent of Russia’s overall population. Meanwhile, the megalopolis and its environs occupy a mere 0.3 percent of the country’s territory. The big concentration of people pushes up the probability of terrorist acts at Moscow’s hydro installations.

Since water has a tangible and ever-growing value, the management of hydro resources has a commercial aspect to it. Freshwater shortages put brake on the social and economic development of a whole range of countries bordering Russia and this makes water a highly demanded commodity. The price of a cubic meter of water has climbed to about 3 euros in the countries of Europe, which means that the idea of freshwater as a commodity for export has acquired practical sense.

At a meeting of ministers and regional governors with members of the United Russia parliamentary faction in 2008, State Duma speaker Boris Gryzlov proposed making water into Russia’s third largest export article in terms of revenues after oil and gas. Nor should one forget a regularly re-emerging idea of diverting part of the water-flow of Siberian rivers to Central Asia with a view to selling it there.

Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov has supported this idea persistently over a number of years. Back in 2002, he sent an analytical note on this subject to President Putin. The history of the concept and the arguments in favor of its implementation are featured in his book “Water and Peace” published in 2008. Luzhkov believes that Russia will thus get sizable political dividends.

Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev called for reviving this long-forgotten project as he addressed the Commonwealth of Independent States’ summit in St. Petersburg in May 2007. Nazarbayev and his counterparts’ statements at international forums point to the acuteness of the situation in Central Asia and contain a hint at potential conflicts over water resources that may spread beyond the region’s boundaries.

Russia can take part in commercial projects in other ways, too. For instance, Russian defense industries have developed unique desalination equipment that can produce distilled water from seawater on an industrial scale. Assessments indicate that the global demand for such equipment comes to $5 bln to $7 bln a year already now.

A well-balanced and rational approach to the use of existing hydro resources can help Russia defend its national interests and extract benefits out of the situation, however problematic it might be.