Russia draining a Ukrainian reservoir is a reminder that water can be a weapon in a warming world

In a warming world, water is an increasingly precious resource — and it can also be used as a weapon when conflict breaks out.

The latest example comes from Ukraine. NPR reported last week that Russia appears to be draining the Khakovka Reservoir in southern Ukraine, imperiling water for drinking and agriculture and potentially endangering the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant by limiting its cooling water. Though Russia’s specific motivations remain unclear, the weaponization of the reservoir’s water joins a human martial tradition dating literally to antiquity. It’s also a worrying portent, with experts warning that targeting of water infrastructure is likely to increase as climate change stresses supplies across the world.

“Climate change is already affecting water availability and water demand .... Where demand for water exceeds water supply are places where we see more likelihood of violence associated with water,” said Peter Gleick, a senior fellow and co-founder of the nonprofit Pacific Institute. “I do believe that climate change is going to make this problem worse.”

From Mesopotamia to modern times

About 4,500 years ago, a Sumerian king in Lagash diverted water flowing to the fertile Gu’edena region, depriving the neighboring Umma of the resource — a major offensive in an extended conflict known as the Sumerian 100 Years War. A couple of millennia later, in 720 B.C., King Sargon II of Assyria targeted wells and damaged irrigation canals as part of an ongoing war; so did his enemies. About a century after that, an Athenian legislator poisoned an aqueduct providing water to the besieged city of Cirrha.

There are hundreds of other such examples throughout human history. To help paint a picture of water’s role in conflicts from ancient times up to the present, Gleick created the Water Conflict Chronology, an open-source database now containing almost 1,300 examples. These are divided into three categories: those where water is a trigger of the conflict, those where it is a casualty of a conflict started for other reasons, and those where it is specifically used as a weapon.

Though water’s place in conflict is essentially as old as war itself, climate change is likely going to add more and more entries to the Water Conflict Chronology. Some research is bearing this out, such as a 2019 study that examined the experiences of people from 17 countries who sought asylum in Germany. More than 80 percent of those interviewed reported water and/or electricity scarcity in their home regions.

“Evidence of environmental terrorism in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan underlines that the links between resource scarcity and national security are clear and growing and the chance that governments or opposition groups strike at water systems, electricity plants and use resources as target, weapon and tool, is real,” wrote the study’s authors, led by Christina Kohler, then of the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt.

In Ukraine, the draining of the reservoir isn’t the first water-related act of aggression. In the war’s early days, Russian troops destroyed a dam in the Kherson region that had been built in 2014 to cut off Crimean water supplies. To the north, Ukrainians flooded the village of Demydiv in order to slow the advance of Russian forces, one of the more direct uses of water as a weapon.

Global South at risk

According to the World Health Organization, more than two billion people already live in water-stressed countries, a number that is expected to grow as the climate warms. A 2016 study found that twice that many people face “severe water scarcity” at least one month of the year. The World Bank warns that climate-induced “water insecurity could multiply the risk of conflict.”

As with many other climate change impacts, the risks that water will turn into a casualty or a weapon in areas of increasing water stress and drought are likely highest in some of the poorest parts of the world. Yemen and Syria, both now in the midst of extended civil wars, and other parts of the Middle East may be among the most obvious candidates given the region’s parched landscapes, but other countries such as India and those along the Mekong and Nile Rivers could also see a rise in water-related violence.

“Places where you have water stress and political instability combined are the places I worry about,” Gleick said. A counterexample could be the U.S. and Mexico’s shared use of the Colorado River, which is in dire straits thanks to an extended drought but seems unlikely to induce high-level violence. “I worry about it less in places where there are good institutions and good diplomatic resources.”

Higher value targets

The biggest worry as climate change worsens is on the “trigger” end of the chronology’s categories, Gleick said, but governments and other belligerents are also increasingly aware of the stress on water as the world warms, and thus on its potential as a target.

“I’m dismayed a little bit at the number of recent examples where violence was used against civilian water infrastructure, in my opinion, in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions protocols of 1977,” he said.

The protocols included explicit prohibition of attacks on “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population.” Those objects include “drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works.” Many of the recent examples took place in Yemen, where the ongoing civil war has killed hundreds of thousands and caused what the U.N. has termed the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The chronology contains almost 150 Yemeni incidents, almost all since 2015, involving destruction of wells, desalination plants, water tanks, and other facilities.

“It does suggest that there’s an awareness of the value of working water systems for country stability, and the potential to destroy that kind of infrastructure,” Gleick said. “I would love it if the international community prosecuted those cases as violations as well as war crimes. But we’re not very good at that.”

Thanks to Dave Tepps for copy editing this article.