Freshwater underpins life, agriculture, energy production, industry, and vital ecosystem functions, yet its availability remains both scarce and uneven across the globe. Only around 2.5% of Earth’s water is freshwater, and just about 0.3% of the planet’s total water supply is easily accessible on the surface for human use. Meanwhile, expanding populations, accelerating urbanization, shifting dietary patterns, and ongoing economic growth continue to push demand upward. At the same time, climate change, retreating glaciers, declining groundwater reserves, pollution, and aging infrastructure are undermining the reliability of supply. Together, these pressures push water beyond a local management concern, turning it into a driver of cross-border strain and strategic competition.
Major forces transforming water into a geopolitical threat
- Scarcity and uneven distribution: Freshwater is geographically concentrated. River basins and aquifers cross national borders, creating dependency relationships among upstream and downstream states.
- Population growth and urbanization: More people concentrated in cities increase municipal and industrial demand, often in basins already stressed by agriculture.
- Agriculture and the water footprint: Agriculture consumes roughly 70% of global freshwater withdrawals, tying food security to water security. Countries dependent on irrigation are vulnerable to both domestic shortages and upstream controls.
- Climate change: Altered precipitation patterns, more extreme droughts and floods, and accelerating glacier melt change seasonal river flows and make supply less predictable.
- Groundwater depletion: Intensive pumping from major aquifers (for example, the North China Plain, Indo-Gangetic Basin, and the Ogallala) is lowering water tables and reducing long-term resilience.
- Water quality degradation: Pollution from agriculture, industry, and untreated sewage reduces usable water, increasing competition for clean supplies.
- Infrastructure and investment gaps: Aging or absent dams, treatment plants, and delivery systems make states vulnerable to service disruptions and create opportunities for political leverage through project financing.
Transboundary rivers and basins: key hotspots and illustrative cases
States upstream can alter timing and quantity of flows; downstream states depend on predictable inflows. Several high-profile cases illustrate how water influences diplomacy, tension, and risk:
- Nile basin: Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile has sparked prolonged friction with downstream Egypt and Sudan concerning water distribution and release protocols during droughts, drawing international mediation and highlighting the vulnerabilities faced by countries dependent on consistent flows for essential irrigation and hydropower.
- Mekong River: China’s upstream dam network and expanding hydropower sector have reshaped seasonal water cycles and fisheries across Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand, with diminished dry-season flows and disrupted sediment movement threatening livelihoods and food production in the Mekong Delta.
- Tigris and Euphrates: Turkey’s extensive dam construction under the Southeastern Anatolia Project has intensified pressure on relations with Syria and Iraq, where farming systems and marshland habitats depend heavily on managed downstream flows.
- Indus Basin: The Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan has weathered multiple periods of strain between the two nuclear-armed states, illustrating both the stabilizing power of formal accords and their fragility when broader geopolitical tensions rise.
- Jordan River and the Levant: Persistent scarcity and uneven distribution continue to aggravate Israeli-Palestinian and regional disputes, with access to water intertwined with broader political challenges.
- Lake Chad and the Sahel: The sharp decline of Lake Chad driven by climate fluctuations and increased withdrawals has deepened economic hardship and contributed to localized conflict and displacement.
Water as a geopolitical tool and security risk
Water may be intentionally or unintentionally employed as a means of influence in political affairs and conflict:
- Upstream infrastructure as leverage: Dams and reservoirs give upstream countries the ability to regulate both the release schedule and the volume of water, allowing them to exert bargaining pressure or apply coercive tactics during moments of instability.
- Resource-based migration and displacement: Declining access to local water supplies pushes populations to relocate and move into cities, burdening host areas and heightening cross-border tensions.
- Violence and local conflicts: Rivalry over water sources and arable terrain can ignite communal clashes, enable insurgent recruitment, and foster criminal activity, as observed in portions of the Sahel, East Africa, and South Asia.
- Economic coercion and trade restrictions: During periods of scarcity, governments might curb exports of crops or other water‑intensive goods, triggering global food‑price volatility and diplomatic strain.
- Infrastructure sabotage and cyber threats: Water networks remain exposed to both physical assaults and digital breaches capable of polluting supplies or halting distribution. Documented cyberattacks on treatment and delivery facilities underscore an emerging security challenge for nations.
Economic and Strategic Aspects
Water interacts with energy and food systems in ways that heighten geopolitical implications:
- Water-energy-food nexus: Hydropower, thermoelectric cooling, and biofuel production all require water. Decisions in one sector affect the others and can trigger transboundary impacts. For example, hydropower expansion upstream can reduce irrigation water downstream during dry seasons, creating trade-offs between energy and food security.
- Virtual water trade: Countries can effectively import water by importing water-intensive crops and goods. Export restrictions during shortages can therefore become geopolitical tools that affect food-importing states.
- Investment and influence: Financing and building large water projects—dams, desalination plants, pipelines—can create dependencies and extend geopolitical influence. External actors, state-owned enterprises, and private corporations that control infrastructure can shape regional alignments.
Governance, law, and institutional gaps
International law offers frameworks for cooperation, but gaps and enforcement limits create vulnerability:
- Legal instruments are uneven: The UN Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses provides principles like equitable and reasonable use and no-harm obligations, but not all states are parties, and many basins lack binding, comprehensive agreements.
- Data sharing and transparency: Cooperative management depends on shared monitoring and forecasting. Where data are withheld, mistrust grows and the risk of miscalculation rises.
- Institutional capacity: Weak water institutions, underfunded basin organizations, and fragmented governance within countries impede conflict prevention and cooperative responses to variability.
Technological responses and their limits
Advances can reduce some risks, but introduce new dynamics:
- Desalination and reuse: Desalination provides reliable freshwater for coastal states, and water reuse increases supply resilience. However, desalination is energy-intensive, expensive, and can be environmentally damaging if brine is not managed properly.
- Improved irrigation and efficiency: Agricultural modernization can reduce water demand, but requires investment, institutional reform, and sometimes changes in cropping patterns that have socio-economic consequences.
- Remote sensing and data tools: Satellite and remote-sensing systems (for example, gravity-based monitoring of aquifer depletion) improve detection of stress but do not automatically translate into cooperative solutions.
- Cybersecurity and infrastructure hardening: Protecting water systems against cyberattack and sabotage is essential, but many utilities lack the resources and expertise to implement robust defenses.
Paths to reduce geopolitical risk
As risks continue to grow, several well‑established approaches can help curb escalation and foster greater stability:
- Strengthen basin-wide institutions: Legal, technical, and financial mechanisms for joint management reduce uncertainty and create platforms for benefit-sharing.
- Promote transparency and data sharing: Real-time flow data, jointly agreed monitoring, and early-warning systems help build trust and reduce the risk of miscalculation.
- Incentivize cooperative infrastructure: Projects designed to deliver shared benefits—such as hydropower with guarantees for downstream flows or regional water-storage arrangements—can align interests.
- Invest in demand management: Water pricing, leak reduction, efficient irrigation, and urban conservation reduce pressure on scarce supplies.
- Integrate water into foreign policy and security planning: Diplomatic engagement, water diplomacy capacity, and integrating water risk into national security assessments can prevent surprises.
- Support adaptive, climate-aware planning: Scenario-based planning, flexible operation rules for reservoirs, and attention to ecological flows increase resilience to climate variability.
Water’s rising geopolitical salience stems from a confluence of finite accessible supply, growing and shifting demand, climate-induced variability, and complex cross-border hydrology. Where institutions, transparency, and shared benefits are weak, water becomes a lever of influence, a trigger for local violence, and a catalyst for interstate tensions. Conversely, investments in cooperative governance, technology that reduces demand and improves resilience, and diplomatic strategies that prioritize equitable, benefit-based solutions can transform water from a driver of conflict into a basis for collaboration. Addressing water as a strategic challenge requires integrated policies that span development, security, trade, and climate resilience; absent such integrated approaches, water-related shocks will increasingly shape geopolitical relationships and regional stability.
