Europe - UNEP

Fish market, Brugge, Belgium. Photo credit: Sandra Arbogast.
diversion, or irrigation scheme—or in its political
setting, especially the breakup of a nation that
results in new international rivers. The second
factor is that existing institutions are unable to
absorb and effectively manage that change.
This is typically the case when there is no treaty
spelling out each nation’s rights and
responsibilities with regard to the shared river,
nor any implicit agreements or cooperative
arrangements. Even the existence of technical
working groups can provide some capability to
manage contentious issues, as they have in the
Middle East.
The overarching lesson of the study is that
unilateral actions to construct a dam or river
diversion in the absence of a treaty or institutional
mechanism that safeguards the interests of other
countries in the basin is highly destabilizing to a
region, often spurring decades of hostility before
cooperation is pursued. In other words, the red
flag for water-related tension between countries is
not water stress per se, as it is within countries,
but rather the unilateral exercise of domination of
an international river, usually by a regional power.
In the Jordan River Basin, for example,
violence broke out in the mid-1960s over an “all-
Arab” plan to divert the river’s headwaters (itself
a pre-emptive move to thwart Israel’s intention to
siphon water from the Sea of Galilee). Israel and
Syria sporadically exchanged fire between March
1965 and July 1966. Water-related tensions in
the basin persisted for decades and only recently
have begun to dissipate.
A similar sequence of events transpired in
the Nile basin, which is shared by 10 countries—
of which Egypt is last in line. In the late 1950s,
hostilities broke out between Egypt and Sudan
over Egypt’s planned construction of the High
Dam at Aswan. The signing of a treaty between
the two countries in 1959 defused tensions
before the dam was built. But no water-sharing
agreement exists between Egypt and Ethiopia,
where some 55% of the Nile’s flow originates,
and a war of words has raged between these two
nations for decades. As in the case of the Jordan,
in recent years the Nile nations have begun to
work cooperatively toward a solution thanks in
part to unofficial dialogues among scientists and
technical specialists that have been held since the
early 1990s, and more recently a ministerial-level
“Nile Basin Initiative” facilitated by the United
Nations and the World Bank.
1.2.2 Intranational Waters
The second set of security issues occurs at the
sub-national level. Much literature on trans-
12 — Hydropolitical Vulnerability and Resilience along International Waters: Europe