Name: Water Conflicts and Diplomacy: Trans-boundary Conflicts and Interbasin Transfers
Uploaded: 2016-07-27T21:46:54.000Z
Duration: 21 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Last session we talked about the general nature of water conflicts, how serious they are,

how you need water governance, effective methods of water governance. There are many things

to talk about on it. This session, I'm going to talk about these two specific types of

problems, the trans-boundary conflict and the interbasin transfer. I'll explain the

nature of each of those as we go along. The transboundary conflict is the situation

where water is crossing some kind of political boundary- a state boundary, a national boundary,

even a county or city boundary can create those kinds of conflicts. The interbasin transfer

is this case where the water is being taken out of one basin and put in another basin.

It can say it's being exported from a basin of origin to another basin usually a permanent

basin. For a few examples, we talked last time about

the Nile Basin and I had a chronology there that shows the utter dependence of Egypt on

that water and how the different meetings have been held over the years, the different

agreements that they've reached, and the situation that we have today with the Nile Basin initiative.

To take that a little further, if you think about the difficulties that are coming into

play in trying to create a successful way to share the waters of the Nile River Basin,

you can start with the growth of Egypt as a downstream state and its utter dependence

on the Nile River for its irrigation, its municipal water, industrial water, energy

generation, and so on. Egypt is going to feel threatened if the upstream states begin to

develop the water resources for their own bona fide purposes. For example, on the Blue

Nile system, you can see here flowing out of Ethiopia, Ethiopia is a developing nation,

has many aspirations, and they want to construct dams and impound the water in reservoirs,

generate electric power with that for their own development. Sudan has similar needs but

also many irrigation needs to water the large agricultural areas that they have. They old

agreements are in some ways out the window because there are a lot of new situations

that are in the picture now. There's a need for some kind of cooperation mechanism that

works. One that's in play today is called the Nile Basin initiative but it's not being

applied to really resolve these issues yet. As in many of the large international examples,

what we have is some unresolved issues and things that are going to have to be worked

out in the future. There's many other examples that we can point

to. The one on the right, the map on the right, you can see is the continent of Africa. You

can see the context of the Nile River flowing here. But you see there are other rivers that

have transboundary issues like between Chad and Niger and Mali down through a drier part

of Africa. Congo River through a very wet part of Africa. Then, in the south, where

you have South Africa and other countries in this drier part, you've got proposals to

do transfers of water, treaties that are going to be needed, and many different agreements

that need to be put in place to resolve all those issue that are coming up. Then on the

left you can see just one example between New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, and even Mexico.

You can see the Rio Grande Basin starts up in Colorado, flows down into New Mexico, and

then into Texas, and then along a national boundary. Many issues as you can imagine.

I'll come back in just a few minutes and talk about this Pecos River Basin where I have

a personal involvement. You can it flowing there from New Mexico into Texas and is actually

a tributary to the Rio Grande at this point. Those were examples of the transboundary situations,

but in the case of the inter-basin transfer, many issues all over the world come into play

there, too. A good example is right here in Colorado. We have a division between a western

part of the state where most of the water originates, mainly in the Colorado River Basin,

and the eastern part of the state where most of the water use occurs with the cities, large

agricultural uses there. A lot of water is taken across the continental divide. The number

you see here, 390,000 acre feet, that's like an average amount which is brought into northern

Colorado, Denver area, and southern Colorado, from head waters from the Colorado River into

the eastern part of the state. This creates a lot of conflicts. It's a trans-natural boundary,

the natural boundary is the continental divide, but it's not transboundary in the sense of

going from one state to another. It does go from one county to another and one region

to another of the state of Colorado. You have a lot of transboundary kind of issues, inter-basin

transfer types of issues. It's extremely complex to resolve these kinds of problems.

If we try to develop a way you can look at these issues and have a classification system,

the way that I've set it up is transboundary problems is one type of problem and inter-basin

transfers is another type of problem. Transboundary problems can occur with a lot of different

scenarios. There are six here. You can have water allocation across borders. You can have

water quality issues across borders, like one state has got an industrial plant just

above the state line and they're releasing pollution across a state line. You can have

a lake that straddles borders like the Great Lakes of the United States. You can have a

river that forms a boundary like the Rio Grande which I showed a minute ago. You can have

cross-border aquifer systems. Then you can have all of the above, complex issues with

a lot of borders and a lot of issues. Then you can have the interbasin transfers as sort

of a different kind of problem from the transboundary conflicts.

All of these require some unique approaches to solutions. You need to have integrated

approaches. You need to have some kind of integrated solution, equitable apportionment.

You need to share the risk, share the financial responsibilities, and work out something that

is good for everybody. This is easy to say and hard to do. That's where really you could

say the rubber meets the road on these transboundary problems. They are tough to work out. It is

the devil in the details that really gets us there. The other type of issue, the interbasin

transfer, there's not really any way to share that much because you're basically exporting

the water from one basin to another. If you have to do that, the way to come up with a

solution approach is to have some kind of compensatory mechanism so that the losing

basin doesn't lose everything, there's a way that they are compensated. We could discuss

some specific examples of that. There won't really be a lot of time in this session to

do that, but that's the basic approach that has worked in cases where we have had some

success. When it comes to transboundary problems, I've

got two or three examples to cite here, a couple of them in the general and one at the

Pecos River where I have a personal involvement. Looking at the general cases, I've got two

international versions to look at there, one Indus river system between India and Pakistan,

the other the Great Lakes between Canada and the United States and several states in the

United States. Look over here first at the Indus river basin and imagine the high degree

of dependence of Pakistan and India on this river system for irrigation and other uses

of water such as hydropower development and how countries which don't have a history of

getting along with each other have to develop some kind of a mechanism, some kind of approach,

to manage that and share the water without conflicts being exacerbated and made worse

by not following through with agreements of different kinds. Then look at the Great Lakes

situation. It's a series of lakes straddling boundaries of different kinds. Boundaries

between US states, boundaries between the US and Canada, and many different issues to

work out. In the Great Lakes system, they actually have a long history of working out

these problems and have come up with some relatively successful compacts and agreements

generally coming together to be called the Great Lakes Compact, Great Lakes Agreement,

that work for all parties involved. Now, I want to tell you just a little bit

more about the Pecos River because of my personal involvement for many years now. Having insight

on how this system developed and how it works now, and what the nitty-gritty are about making

our transboundary water agreement work out in practice. If you look at the Pecos River

Basin which is evident over here in this map on the left, you see the river rising up near

Santa Fe with snowmelt, flowing through arid areas, down through New Mexico, through a

boundary reservoir, Red Bluff Reservoir at the state line, and then through a dry part