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When The Water Ends: Africa’s Climate Conflicts:
For thousands of years, nomadic herdsmen have roamed the harsh, semi-arid lowlands that stretch across 80 percent of Kenya and 60 percent of Ethiopia. Descendants of the oldest tribal societies in the world, they survive thanks to the animals they raise and the crops they grow, their travels determined by the search for water and grazing lands.
These herdsmen have long been accustomed to adapting to a changing environment. But in recent years, they have faced challenges unlike any in living memory: As temperatures in the region have risen and water supplies have dwindled, the pastoralists have had to range more widely in search of suitable water and land. That search has brought tribal groups in Ethiopia and Kenya in increasing conflict with each other, as pastoral communities kill each other over water and grass.
“When the Water Ends,” a 16-minute video produced by Yale Environment 360 in collaboration with MediaStorm, tells the story of this conflict and of the increasingly dire drought conditions facing parts of East Africa. To report this video, Evan Abramson, a 32-year-old photographer and videographer, spent two months in the region early this year, living among the herding communities. He returned with a tale that many climate scientists say will be increasingly common in the 21st century and beyond — how worsening drought in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere will pit group against group, nation against nation. As one UN official told Abramson, the clashes between Kenyan and Ethiopian pastoralists represent “some of the world’s first climate-change conflicts.”...
This is not a cheery, “look at how we all worked together to solve this terrible problem” video. It’s a frank and sometimes painful to watch depiction of a terrible situation that has arisen out of the complex of our sustainability challenges, nearly all centered around water.
We should avoid thinking of the situation in this documentary as a template for future water issues. While the water-related violence in Kenya and Ethiopia seems to be largely or even entirely the act of individuals and not governments, all such conflicts won’t play out that way. In particular, in places where there is friction over transboundary waterways and disputes over which country is or isn’t using more than its share, we could see trade wars that impact millions of people economically. And in some cases, such issues could indeed rise to the level of state-level warfare, although I expect that to be rare.[1] Plus, other water issues, like rising sea levels, will take on entirely different forms.
Near the end of the video there’s a graphic that says, “By 2025, half of the world’s population will face a water shortage.” I don’t know the source of that statement, but it sounds right to me. Look at the various dry or soon-to-be-dry spots around the wqorld (which I talked about yesterday in Time is running out), and it’s not hard to see how we get to half of humanity living with water stress at least part of each year.
Of course, we have the energy-water nexus coming into play, as it always does, with the plan to build the Gibe III dam, mentioned above, which will greatly aggravate the water issues. Do the people in that part of the world need more and more reliable electricity? Absolutely. Do they need freedom from water scarcity? Absolutely. How do we reconcile those conflicting needs on the scale needed? I have no idea. It would be simplistic to say that we have to decouple water and electricity there (as well as in many other places around the world), but that’s much easier said than done.
Finally, the video clearly shows the profound error in relying solely on adaptation as a response to climate change. If we give in to the view of delayers and deniers and only “fix problems once they occur”, then we’re signing up for two very bad results at once. The first is human impact. Waiting until “we’re sure something needs to be done” is a euphemism for, “we’ll do nothing until the body count and the economic impact to people we care about is too large to ignore”. And given the time lags involved in formulating and implementing large scale adaptation measures, we’re willingly accepting not just the human impacts that spur us to action, but those that will continue while we implement our “solution”. The other bad result is that we will be making those large, expensive, and painful adaptions endlessly unless we also take aggressive mitigation steps to break the cycle of climate change and response.
We’re already far enough down the climate change road that adaptation costs will be high and ongoing, but settling for (or even embracing) an adaptation-only path is far worse than doing whatever we can to solve the underlying problem.
[1] As for trade wars, I expect them to become far more common. Look at how little it took for China to squeeze Japan and the US by restricting shipments of rare earth elements. The most likely scenario is the formation of trading blocs, basically “West plus Japan” vs. “China and India”, as each tries to leverage the other into doing less harm to our shared environment. (Where does Russia fall in this split? I have no bloody idea. They sell a lot of natural gas to Europe and oil to various countries, including the US, so I don’t know if they would want to stick with the West, their customers, or the East, and try to use their leverage against the West, as in their frequent threats in recent years to cut off gas supplies to Europe during the winter season.)
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