Suchergebnisse

Climate-driven water variability is a natural phenomenon observed across river basins, but predicted to increase due to climate change. Environmental change of this kind may aggravate political tensions, especially in regions that are not equipped with an appropriate institutional apparatus. This paper argues that attempts to assess the ability of states to deal with variability in the future rests with considering how river basins with agreements have fared in the past. The paper investigates whether basins governed by treaties witness less tension (and by extension more cooperation) over shared water in comparison with those basins not governed by treaties, using the 1948-2008 country dyads event data from the Basins at Risk project. The results provide evidence to suggest that the presence of a treaty promotes cooperation. Furthermore, the number of agreements between riparian countries has a significant positive effect on cooperation, which is robust across different specifications controlling for a broad set of climatic, geographic, political, and economic variables.

Many river basins will likely face higher hydrologic variability, including extreme floods and droughts, due to climate change, with economic and political consequences. Water treaties that govern international basins could face non-compliance among riparians and inter-state tensions as hydrologic variability increases. Accurate monitoring of water resources is essential to cope with these fluctuations in flow. This paper demonstrates a simple yet robust procedure—the Basist Wetness Index—to predict gauge station (actual water resources) measurements of surface wetness values derived from satellite data (for 1988-2013) and empirically derived flow distributions in two international river basins: Zambezi and Mekong. The paper further undertakes an economic analysis (applied to the Mekong), which identifies not only the economic costs and losses due to extreme fl ow events, but likewise showcases the benefits countries could potentially reap should they be able to make use of such flow data in real time. An illustrative application, using the wetness data and socio-political data, is also performed to highlight the utility of the procedure for research in the field of conflict and cooperation over water. The paper concludes that satellite data modeled with gauge station flow can help reduce the uncertainty inherent in negotiating international water issues. Moreover, the satellite observations can provide near real time monitoring of water resources, and provide valuable lead time for impending droughts and floods. Thus, the approach presented in the article can assist policy makers to devise more efficient and cooperative institutional apparatus.

In the existing 276 international river basins, the increase in water variability projected by most climate change scenarios may present serious challenges to riparian states. This research maps the institutional resilience to water variability in transboundary basins and combines it with both historic and projected variability regimes, with the objective of identifying areas at potential risk of future hydropolitical tension. To do so, it combs existing international treaties for sources of institutional resilience and considers the coefficient of variation of runoff as a measure of past and future water variability. The study finds significant gaps in both the number of people and area covered by institutional stipulations to deal with variability in South America and Asia. At present, high potential risk for hydropolitical tensions associated with water variability is identified in 24 transboundary basins and seems to be concentrated mainly in northern and sub-Saharan Africa. By 2050, areas at greatest potential risk are more spatially dispersed and can be found in 61 international basins, and some of the potentially large impacts of climate change are projected to occur away from those areas currently under scrutiny. Understanding when and where to target capacity-building in transboundary river basins for greater resilience to change is critical. This study represents a step toward facilitating these efforts and informing further qualitative and quantitative research into the relationship between climate change, hydrological variability regimes, and institutional capacity for accommodating variability.