Olivier Matthys/European Press Photo Agency The Indus River flows through a valley in northern Pakistan. Arguments over control of the Indus River system have been a source of tension between the two rival powers on the subcontinent.
For centuries, water has been a potent weapon between warring states. When Pisa was at war with Florence, Leonardo da Vinci and Machiavelli planned to divert the Arno and leave Pisa dry.
For at least as long, water has been a casus belli. India and Pakistan have contested one another’s access to the Indus River system; a 2006 study commissioned by the Defense Department said, “for over a half century, bitter rivalry over river resources” has arguably “been one of the leading causes of full-scale warfare between them.” Meanwhile, while India and Bangladesh have had standoffs over the Ganges. In the last 50 years, Israel and Syria have fought over the rights to the Jordan River, and Brazil and Paraguay have argued over control of the Paraná.
Such conflicts and uses of water as a weapon are now controlled by hundreds of international agreements. But climate change could increase the possibility of new water wars as some flows become anemic and others become unusable torrents. But as a new study by Heather Cooley and Peter H. Gleick of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute pointed out, “Most trans-boundary water agreements” are “based on the assumption that future water supply and quality will not change.”
Bloomberg News Sir Nicholas Stern, Britain’s chief climate change economist, was optimistic about a new global warming treaty in December.
In a speech in Toronto on Friday, Lord Nicholas Stern, the economics adviser to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the author of a massive 2006 study on the cost of climate change, outlined in broad strokes a potential international deal to confront global warming — the objective of a global conference on climate change to be held in Copenhagen this December.
The good news, he told the Economic Club of Toronto, is that efforts to bring atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations down to 50 percent of 1990 levels will account for just 2 percent of global G.D.P., in terms of higher costs. “It will be a tremendous investment,” Mr. Stern said.
The goal is to limit global emissions at two tonnes per capita, which is drastically below the output of industrialized nations like the United States and Canada. “This has to be the biggest international collaboration in history.”