The Water Wars Are Already Here

Stop Saying "Coming"

Every few months, someone publishes an article warning that water wars are "coming." That climate change "could" create water conflicts. That we "might" face shortages by 2050.

This framing is a lie of tense. The water wars are here. They're being fought right now, in courtrooms, legislatures, international tribunals, and occasionally with actual weapons. Two billion people on this planet lack reliable access to safe drinking water, according to the WHO's 2023 joint monitoring report. That's not a projection. That's a body count in progress.

The reason the future tense persists is that the people writing the warnings mostly live in places where you turn the tap and water comes out. Their crisis hasn't arrived yet. But for a significant portion of humanity, it arrived a long time ago.

The Colorado Is a Ghost

If you want to understand the water crisis without leaving the United States, start with the Colorado River.

The Colorado River Compact of 1922 divided the river's water among seven states based on flow measurements taken during an abnormally wet period. The compact allocated more water than the river actually carries in a normal year. This was known almost immediately. It was ignored for decades because there was enough surplus to paper over the math.

That surplus is gone.

Lake Mead, the reservoir behind Hoover Dam that supplies water to 25 million people in Nevada, Arizona, and California, hit its lowest level in 2022 since the reservoir was filled in the 1930s. Lake Powell, upstream, was barely better. The Bureau of Reclamation has imposed unprecedented cuts on downstream states. Arizona farmers have had their allocations slashed. Cities are scrambling.

And the Colorado is just one river. Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute and one of the world's leading water researchers, has been documenting water-related conflicts for decades. His Water Conflict Chronology now contains over 1,300 entries, instances where water has been a trigger, weapon, or casualty of conflict. The database grows faster every year.

Underground Theft

Surface water (rivers, lakes, reservoirs) is visible. When it disappears, people notice. Groundwater is different. You can drain an aquifer for decades before anyone realizes what's happening, because the effects are delayed and invisible until they're catastrophic.

The Ogallala Aquifer stretches beneath eight states in the American Great Plains. It irrigates roughly 30% of the nation's agricultural groundwater use. And it's being drained at a rate that far exceeds natural recharge. In parts of Kansas and Texas, the aquifer has declined by more than 150 feet. Some areas that were farmland a generation ago are reverting to dryland because there's simply nothing left to pump.

The Ogallala took millions of years to fill. At current extraction rates, large sections will be functionally depleted within decades. There is no replacement. When it's gone, the breadbasket of America contracts, permanently.

But at least the Ogallala is being drained by Americans to grow American food. In Arizona, something considerably more absurd is happening. Saudi Arabia's largest dairy company, Almarai, has been pumping Arizona groundwater, essentially for free under long-term leases on state land, to grow alfalfa for export to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia depleted its own aquifers through decades of unsustainable agriculture, then outsourced the problem to the American desert. Arizona residents get to watch their water table drop so that Saudi cows can eat.

This isn't a conspiracy theory. It's been extensively reported by the Arizona Republic, ProPublica, and the New York Times. The leases were legal. The outrage was bipartisan. The water is still leaving.

Day Zero Is Not Hypothetical

Cape Town, South Africa, in 2018. The city of four million people came within weeks of shutting off municipal water entirely, an event officials called "Day Zero." Residents were limited to 50 liters per day. People lined up at natural springs. The agricultural sector lost an estimated 30,000 jobs.

Cape Town narrowly avoided Day Zero through a combination of severe rationing, emergency supply measures, and rain that finally arrived after a three-year drought. The crisis receded. The conditions that caused it didn't.

Chennai, India, in 2019. Four reservoirs that supply the city of ten million went nearly dry. Water trucks became the primary distribution mechanism. Fights broke out at distribution points. Hotels closed. Offices sent workers home. The city, India's sixth largest, functionally ran out of water.

Flint, Michigan, starting in 2014. A cost-cutting decision to switch the city's water supply to the Flint River without proper corrosion treatment leached lead into the drinking water of 100,000 people, most of them Black, for nearly two years before officials acknowledged the problem. At least twelve people died of Legionnaires' disease linked to the water. Thousands of children were exposed to lead levels known to cause irreversible neurological damage.

Flint wasn't a scarcity problem. It was a governance problem. But that distinction matters less than you'd think, because scarcity and governance failure feed each other. When water is abundant, bad governance is survivable. When it's scarce, bad governance kills people.

Privatization and Who Profits

In 2000, the Bolivian city of Cochabamba erupted in protests after the government, under pressure from the World Bank, privatized its water system. The new operator, a subsidiary of the U.S. corporation Bechtel, raised prices by as much as 200%. People who were already poor found themselves unable to afford water. Even rainwater collection was technically prohibited under the concession contract.

The protests became an uprising. The Cochabamba Water War, as it came to be called, forced the government to cancel the contract and return water to public control. It became a global symbol of resistance to water privatization.

But the privatization push didn't stop. It just got quieter. Nestle and its competitors have been buying up water rights and spring access across the developing world for decades, bottling water from aquifers that communities depend on and selling it back to them at markup. In the United States, private equity firms are acquiring water rights in the West, betting that scarcity will make those rights more valuable. Water is being financialized. In 2020, water futures began trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for the first time.

Let that settle for a second. You can now speculate on the scarcity of the substance human beings need to survive. Wall Street can profit when your water supply fails.

The Geopolitics of Thirst

Water scarcity will reshape geopolitics more profoundly than oil ever did. Oil has substitutes (expensive, disruptive substitutes, but substitutes). Water has none.

The Nile is shared by eleven countries. Egypt depends on it almost entirely for its freshwater. Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam, completed on the Blue Nile, gives Addis Ababa significant leverage over downstream flows. Egypt has openly discussed military options. This is not a hypothetical conflict. It's an active diplomatic crisis with nuclear-armed implications given Egypt's military capacity.

India and Pakistan share the Indus. The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 has survived three wars, but it was negotiated when glaciers in the Himalayas and Karakoram were stable. Those glaciers are retreating. The river's long-term flow is uncertain. A treaty built on assumptions about water availability that no longer hold is a treaty waiting to fail.

The Jordan River, the Tigris-Euphrates system, the Mekong: every major shared river basin in the world is under stress from some combination of population growth, agricultural demand, industrial use, pollution, and climate change. The institutions governing these basins were designed for conditions of relative abundance. Scarcity breaks institutions.

What Comes Next

Here is what we know. Glaciers are retreating, reducing the meltwater that feeds rivers serving billions of people. Aquifers are being depleted faster than they recharge. Climate change is making precipitation less predictable, more intense when it comes, longer between events. Demand is rising as populations grow and diets shift toward more water-intensive foods.

None of these trends are reversing. Some of them are accelerating.

The question isn't whether water will define the politics of the next century. It's whether the response will be collective or coercive, whether water scarcity produces cooperation or conquest. The early evidence isn't encouraging. The people with the most water are selling it. The people with the most power are hoarding it. And the people with the least of both are dying quietly enough that it doesn't make the evening news.

Stop calling it a future crisis. Call it what it is: the central resource conflict of our time, already underway, already claiming lives, and barely registering in the political consciousness of the countries best positioned to do something about it.