Water crisis could lead to conflicts in West Asia
NICOSIA [CYPRUS]: The Middle East is warming at twice the global average and this summer several countries like Kuwait, Oman, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia recorded temperatures exceeding 50 degrees Celsius(122 Fahrenheit), as forests burn, and severe droughts become more and more frequent. There is compelling evidence that it will be the Middle East region that climate change will hit hardest.
Already several rivers in the Middle East have lost almost half of their annual flow in the last fifty years.
During the same period, the surface area of several lakes has shrunken considerably. A case in point is lake Urmia in Iran, which has halved in size - from 5,400 square kilometres in the 1990s to 2,500 square kilometrespartly due to the building of dams in its basin, which reduced the flow of water in the lake and partly due to climate change.
All over the Middle East the per capita amount of water every year becomes less and less, and many people fear that the old saying that "the wars of the future will be fought over water than oil" may soon become a frightening reality in this volatile region.
Amro Selim, Director of the Elmoustkbal Organization for Strategic Studies also points out "Most countries in the Middle East region share at least one underground water reservoir with their neighbours, which highlights the importance of cooperative management of shared water resources. This also indicates that control of water resources and access to water will be the principal cause of the conflicts and disputes that the region will likely experience in the near future." Disputes over water are quite frequent in the Middle East, as many of the rivers and lakes in the region are shared by two or more countries. Building dams in one country significantly reduces the amount of water available to neighbouring countries, which see the area available for irrigated cultivation diminish, threatening the livelihood of their citizens.
An example of this is the construction of the Grand Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia on the Nile River, which reduced downstream flow to Egypt by more than 25 per cent. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has threatened military action unless the ground rules for filling the dam are agreed upon. Sisi openly declared the dam is "a matter of life and death" for Egypt.