Introduction. Does distribution of freshwater brews conflicts and war?

 

Hello everyone! 

Welcome to my blog, where I am going to research and educate myself, and hopefully the reader, on the topic of water and politics within the vast continent of Africa. 

Water plays a fundamental role in all parts of the world and is one of the natural resource’s humans are unable to sustain life without. Freshwater systems are one of the largest in the world on the African continent and contribute to the balanced working of water, carbon, and energy cycles across the world. In the past decades, the topic of water has become a major concern as pressure from expanding urban areas, climate change, low investment, corruption, government weakness and poor management of water resources reduces availability of water supply. 

On one hand, lack of management, political tensions between the governments and unilateral actions from the states continues to increase the risk of conflicts. On the other hand, already existing water stress and pressure due to urbanisation, trying to meet the demands of rapid growing urban population, puts further stress on the countries and their governing bodies.(Pena-Ramos et al.,2022)  Urbanisation creates a different set of challenges that will need to be addressed, as increased volumes of water is being take out from existing water sources, leaving rural areas more vulnerable to insufficient water availability, leading to increased inequality levels in not only social but economic dimensions.(Van Rooijen et al.,2009)  This influx of water creates influx of human waste, overtaking the wastewater management structure, yet the developments to the system are not made fast enough to meet the demands of expanding urban areas. As water sources are often shared between multiple countries, such as the Nile or Lake Chad, urbanisation can fuel conflicts between countries as the demand for freshwater continues to grow. Thus, improvements must be made to existing inefficient legislation in the field of water management.

Water management can act as a political statement. Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) can be viewed as such, as it sparked a dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia. As both Sudan and Egypt rely heavily on the waters of the Nile, the reservoir poses a serious threat to the water supplies. (Pemunta et al., 2020) Ethiopia has argued that the dam will be beneficial to the downstream countries by increasing water availability during low-flow months and smoothing variations in water flow, enhancing the ability of dams in Sudan to generate electricity. However, Ethiopia unilaterally reached the decision, without continuing negotiations to reach an agreement between all the countries involved. 

As I believe politics play an integral role on the decision achieved during COP, such as political relationship between China and the United States is critical to global progress on climate change and their cooperation would have significant impact on global policies.  I hope to explore the link between water availability, climate crisis and the role of politics and governance in it. Economically lower countries tend to emit the lowest amount of emissions yet they become the most vulnerable in the face of climate change. With upcoming COP27, which this year will take place in Egypt, it will be interesting to observe the effects of climate policies on the countries in Africa and whether it would be concentrated on sustaining and providing needed support to the more vulnerable regions of the continent. 

I hope this initial post gave some insight to the complex politics in the context of Africa that I will further explore and try to understand better.