Water Crises, Security and Climate Change with Adam Lammon, Bianca Majumder and Bradley L. Nelson WATER CRISES, SECURITY AND CLIMATE CHANGE Editors: Geoffrey Kemp and Luke Hagberg with Adam Lammon, Bianca Majumder and Bradley L. Nelson Center for the National Interest The Center for the National Interest is a nonpartisan public policy institution established by former President Richard Nixon in 1994. Its current programs focus on American defense and national security, energy and climate security, regional security in the Middle East, and U.S. relations with China, Japan, Europe, and Russia. The Center also publishes the bimonthly foreign affairs magazine The National Interest. The Center is supported by foundation, corporate and individual donors, as well as by an endowment. Copyright 2018. Center for the National Interest. All Rights Reserved. Water Crises, Security and Climate Change Edited by Geoffrey Kemp and Luke Hagberg with Adam Lammon, Bianca Majumder, and Bradley L. Nelson Center for the National Interest 1025 Connecticut Ave, NW, Suite 1200 Washington, D.C. 20036 Phone: (202) 887-1000 E-mail: [email protected] www.cftni.org Cover design by Gabriella Turrisi Photographs from Reuters (top to bottom, left to right): Adrees Latif, Carlos Barria, Mohamed Abd El Ghany, Rafiquar Rahman, Nasser Nuri Acknowledgments Over a period of six years, the project has benefitted from the major contributions from a group of talented and dedicated research interns who worked at various times at the Center for the National Interest. These interns worked closely with the editors and provided substantial written contributions to the study. However, as the scope of the project expanded and evolved, the editors decided to restrict the written text to issues related to fresh water scarcity and sea level rise in certain areas of the world. As a consequence, a considerable amount of writing provided by these research interns has not been included in the final text. We owe all who contributed to this study a great debt: Noah Agily, Maram Alomari, Alec Bania, Marzia Borsoi-Kelly, Chelsea Cohen, Michael Crowley, Jacob Eishen, Ian Engel, Ann Gilligan, Mitchell Hailstone, Zachary Jutcovich, Gray Louis, Jack Mulcaire, Nick Palczew, Philip Rossetti, Samira Seraji, May Stearman, and Benjamin Totto. This project was funded by major grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, for which we owe our sincere thanks for their patient and consistent support over the years. The project has benefitted from insight provided by Caitlin Werrell and Francesco Femia, co-founders and presidents of the Center for Climate and Security. The study also benefitted from the contribution of scholars and practitioners who met on two occasions at the Tufts European Center in Talloires, France on May 8-11, 2014, and May 5-8, 2015. The participants in the two Talloires workshops on climate change and international security were: Deana Arsenian, Bob Barnes, Uday Bhaskar, Tim Boersma, Brahma Chellaney, Daniel Chiu, Shahram Chubin, Francesco Femia, Corey Johnson, Ellen Laipson, Thomas Mahnken, Jeffrey Mazo, Janne Nolan, Christine Parthemore, David Slayton, David Titley, Stacy VanDeveer, Caitlin Werrell, and Dov Zakheim. We also owe a great debt to the Director of the Tufts European Center, Gabriella Goldstein. Without her exceptional support, these workshops would not have been possible. Table of Contents Executive Summary ...................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 5 Chapter 1: Water and National Security ...................................................................................................... 9 Part I: Fresh Water Scarcity and Security Challenges in the Greater Middle East and South-Central Asia...................................................................................................................... 27 Chapter 2: Drought and the Syrian Crisis.................................................................................................. 31 Chapter 3: Yemen’s Water Crisis and State Collapse ........................................................................... 35 Chapter 4: Iran and Afghanistan .................................................................................................................. 45 Chapter 5: The Indus River Dispute ........................................................................................................... 57 Chapter 6: Fresh Water and the Nile Basin............................................................................................... 65 Chapter 7: Central Asian Water Disputes ................................................................................................. 75 Part II: The Threat of Sea Level Rise ....................................................................................... 83 Chapter 8: Low-Lying Countries ................................................................................................................. 87 Chapter 9: Effects of Sea Level Rise on River Basins .......................................................................... 99 Chapter 10: Alaska and the Arctic ............................................................................................................ 105 Chapter 11: Challenges for the U.S. Eastern Seaboard ...................................................................... 111 Chapter 12: The Hurricane Season of 2017 ........................................................................................... 125 Part III: Implications ................................................................................................................ 135 Chapter 13: Future Challenges .................................................................................................................. 137 Appendix .................................................................................................................................... 153 Weather and War: Historical Examples .................................................................................................. 155 Maps Illustrating the Resource Nexus……………………………………………..……..…………….10 Rivers Feeding into the Sistan………………………………………………………..….………47 Indus Water Treaty, 1960……………………………………………………….….…….….......59 Vulnerability of Bangladesh…………………………………………………………..………....95 Impact of 1-Meter Sea Level Rise on the Nile Delta…………….……………….…..…….......101 Shrinking Arctic Ice, 1970-2100……………………………………………………..…………108 Impact of 1.5-Meter Sea Level Rise on Southern Florida………………………………...……115 Hampton Roads Infrastructure: Potential Impact of Sea Level Rise on Military Sites…..…….117 Impact of 1-Meter Sea Level Rise on Louisiana……………………………………………….123 Executive Summary The historically severe drought in Syria from 2006-2011 led to the migration of rural communities to already overburdened urban centers, which concurrent with the state’s mismanagement of freshwater resources, helped foment the social unrest and the uprisings against President Bashar al-Assad. The ongoing conflict has had repercussions around the globe with refugees fleeing to, and having an unmistakable political impact upon, neighboring states and Europe. The war in Yemen was rooted in the Arab Spring, but while the attempts to overthrow President Ali Abdullah Saleh were eventually successful, the political transition was not. The overextraction of Yemen’s groundwater led to an unprecedented water crisis that has been exacerbated by the civil war. Terrorist cells, militant insurgencies, and foreign interventions have undermined efforts to reform the Yemeni government and address this humanitarian catastrophe. Conflict over water does not always result in overt violence, although it often produces complex interstate tensions. Water-sharing agreements in South Asia, often drafted by colonial powers, are outdated and have been further complicated by the impact of rising temperatures on the long-term sustainability of waterways fed by glacial melt. India and Pakistan’s dispute over the Indus River’s allocation is both complicated by their colonial history and the disputed territory of Kashmir through which the river and its tributaries flow. While resolving this particular issue would be one step of many towards mending their bilateral relations, establishing a basis for cooperation would reduce tensions and meet mutual objectives of stable water supplies. The Helmand River, shared between Iran and Afghanistan, has been the subject of repeated negotiations, since the two countries are at different stages in their infrastructural development and neither efficiently utilizes the freshwater capacity currently allotted to them. Iran’s subversive employment of the Taliban against Afghan development projects to prevent losing water resources reveals that non-state actors can be directed by states to exploit issues of water scarcity, or they themselves can target water supplies for their own objectives, as has happened repeatedly in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. 1 Water Crises, Security and Climate Change In the Nile River Delta and the Central Asian Republics, the multilateral nature of disputes over limited freshwater resources only increases the difficulty of negotiations. Upstream states can exert outsized influence over freshwater flows and unilaterally affect downstream flow by building dams for hydropower,