Former UN Secretary-General Boutros Ghali once said that the wars in the next century would be fought over water. And at the time many people believed him, including Ismael Serageldin, the vice president of the World Bank.

While this sounded tantalizingly correct, serious research into the subject has revealed a very different set of outcomes. A database was compiled of all known modern water-related events by researchers at Oregon State University and these were analyzed using various statistical tools. Out of a total of 1,831 events on record, 507 were of a conflictual nature, 96 were neutral and a staggering 1,228 were cooperative.

When these were analyzed in more detail by splitting the conflict and cooperative elements into different categories of intensity, it was found that there were no cases of water as a cause of war, although there was a lot of evidence of water as a weapon of war.

Cooperative events featured more prominently than conflict events by a ratio of 2:1, but more importantly, the vast majority of events were mild, falling in the range of rhetoric or exchange of words only. A mere 37 events could be called acute conflict, and of these 30 were between Israel and one of her neighbours, so these water-related conflicts were embedded in the larger Arab-Israeli problematique.

Significantly however, this study found that water acts as a unifier, even when other political tensions exist (with the one exception noted above). An excellent example of water as a driver of cooperation can be found in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region.

The SADC region is extremely water scarce, with water posing potential limitations to the future economic growth potential of at least four of the most economically developed countries — South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe. Significantly, these countries all share a number of transboundary waters — rivers and aquifers that cross international political borders — and have chosen collectively to manage these resources as strategic assets to be shared. One indicator of this is the global norm in international river basin agreements between riparian countries, where the pattern consists of bilateral agreements in river basins that contain more than two riparian states.

Almost all of the international river basins shared by these four countries have multilateral agreements in place where there are more than two riparian states, and in all cases have functioning River Basin Commissions in these specific river systems. These agreements have been negotiated during times of great political tension, when the Cold War turned large parts of Southern Africa into localized theaters of armed military conflict. Even during the most hostile periods of military engagement, the water resource managers still spoke with each other, and these agreements and their resultant commissions have withstood the dual test of fire and time.

It therefore comes as no surprise that when the Cold War hostilities ended, agreement was reached between all of the sovereign states in Southern Africa to join forces under the SADC umbrella, modelled on the European Union (EU) lines with a vision of a future common market and currency, facilitated by infrastructure such as roads, railways, harbors and telecommunications. The very first protocol that was signed under the SADC umbrella was the Protocol on Shared Watercourse Systems, which established the enabling environment in which shared water resources could be leveraged to promote this regional political and economic vision. This builds on the EU experience with the iron, coal and energy agreements that paved the way for the birth of the European Common Market, and ultimately the European Union.

This has great significance for the Arab world for a number of strategic reasons. Firstly, the majority of the Arab world is water scarce, with water-related limitations to future economic growth and prosperity, so they can learn from the Southern African case, thereby ensuring a soft landing in future.

Secondly, the Arab economies are mostly driven by oil, but this is a finite resource, so wise leaders would be thinking about a future situation in which current oil money is invested in a diversified economy, of which water treatment surely ranks as one of the most important strategic priorities. Thirdly, linking with the developing South has advantages in a world that is dominated by one remaining superpower, seemingly intent on enforcing a new world order based on their unilateral view of reality.

In the final analysis, water can truly be the tie that binds, remembering that because water is the essence of life, it is far too important to squabble over. It has the capacity to bring forth the greatest of human wisdom in the pursuit of the noblest of all ideals — sustainable peace and the opportunity for all human beings to reach the pinnacle of their own inherent potential. After all water has spiritual values that transcend all major religious belief systems in the world today, as well as being the stuff from which energy is transferred from hydrocarbons into steam to power our economies, and the humblest of all tasks in washing away the waste caused by human life.

Water is noble indeed!

(Dr. Anthony Turton — Gibb-SERA Chair in Integrated Water Resource Management — [email protected])