In this lesson we're going to talk about water as a potential source of competition, a potential
source of conflict, and at times a potential opportunity for cooperation. You see, historically
we've found that communities, cities, civilizations would tend to grow up alongside a river, a
lake, alongside a body of water because of the importance of water to human life, but
also because of the importance of water as a means of transportation. That was the historical
context, but more recently we see communities growing up in the desert: Los Angeles, Phoenix,
Las Vegas. And so we see where there's populations growing where there is a lack of water, and
this has led to a lot of major projects bringing water from some distance away to allow a community
to continue to thrive and to further grow. We see this in California where water comes
from far away in California to Los Angeles because of the population there and the need
for that water.
So we find that in the western part of the United States there tends to be less rainfall,
less water, and so there's more need for moving water to a given community to provide the
water that's necessary for livelihood. And there was a organization that was founded
called the Bureau of Reclamation--reclaiming the arid West by building dams, reservoirs,
water supplies and pipelines to carry that water some distance to where the population
centers were. And there is an excellent book called Cadillac Desert that talks about the
process of how all this happened, the challenges, the engineering successes, the social, cultural,
and even the political aspects that surrounded this development.
A little closer to home, right here in Oklahoma, we see that as we go from the western part
of the state of Oklahoma, we have on the order of 10-15 inches of rainfall. In the center
part of the state here where Norman, Oklahoma City are, we have 30, 35 inches of rainfall
a year. As we go to the eastern side of the state, we get to 50 or more than 50 inches
of rainfall a year. And so we have less rainfall, less water in the west, intermediate in the
center, and and more water on the eastern part of the state. So, for example Oklahoma
City, half of the water that Oklahoma City relies upon for drinking water comes from
Lake Atoka in Southeast Oklahoma. That water is pumped 100 miles. There's a pipe line that's
100 miles long that brings that water from Lake Atoka to Lake Draper, which becomes the
water supply for half of the water for the city of Oklahoma City. They have to lift that
water 500 to 600 feet to get it from Lake Atoka to Lake Draper. The energy cost of moving
that water accounts for half the cost of the water for the city of Oklahoma City. As the
cities continue to grow, there's a need for additional water, and the city is considering
building a second pipeline to a potential cost on the order of $1 billion just for the
pipe to get the water. And so you see where the population center is at a different location
in the state than where the rainfall is, and so it's a major effort to move the water.
Oklahoma City also gets water from Lake Canton, and that water flows- Lake Canton is to the
north/northwest of Oklahoma City, and that water flows by gravity to the city and provides
a major portion of the remaining drinking water for the city.
So that's Oklahoma City. What about right here in Norman? Norman's an interesting case,
where initially the city of Norman relied upon wells, groundwater for the drinking water
for the city of Norman. As the population grew to the point they began to exhaust the
groundwater supply that was available at that time, so Lake Thunderbird was built. Lake
Thunderbird, 10 miles east of the city of Norman, and that became the dominant source
of water for the city, built in the mid-60s, mid-1960s. But eventually as the city continued
to grow more and more, the city is now faced to the point where in the summer, the surface
water from Lake Thunderbird and the groundwater from the wells is not sufficient to meet peak
demands in the summer, and so the city of Norman finds itself needing to find additional
water. In those peak periods now in the summer, the city has to buy surplus water from Oklahoma
City to meet those peak demands, and the city of Norman is looking at other options, considering
maybe bringing water from 30 miles away, maybe permanently tapping in to water that's coming
up to Oklahoma City. Or possibly taking the wastewater that the city discharges down the
Canadian River, the South Canadian River and as opposed to sending that downstream, maybe
taking part of that, treating it to a very high level, and then augmenting the water
in Lake Thunderbird, and we'll talk about that more in a future lesson when we talk
about water reuse.
So we see that sometimes the water that we have available is not in the same location
where the population is, and we move the water around as a result. Sometimes this can result
in competition and potential conflict, and just to cite a couple examples right here
in Oklahoma, there also a lake down in southeast Oklahoma called Sardis Lake. And there's the
interest in potentially moving that water to the center part of the state, but it turns
out several Native American tribes feel that they have some rights to that water based
upon treaties from much earlier. And so there's been some discussion and and debate, and there's
currently trying to achieve a compromise on the distribution of that water between the
Native rights and the rights of the the people in central Oklahoma. Another example of competition
would be with our sister state to the south, the state of Texas. And the state of Texas
sees that we have extra water in Southeast Oklahoma, and they would like to come across
the state line and take some of that water and move it to Texas due in the Arlington-Fort
Worth area. This actually resulted in a lawsuit, the state of Texas sued the state of Oklahoma
over the rights to get that. And this worked its way up to the court and went all the way
to the Supreme Court. And ultimately the Supreme Court determined that the state of Texas did
not have the right. They felt like on based on some previous agreements that that right
was included in those agreements, but the Supreme Court decided that that was not part
of those previous agreements, and the state of Texas could not come into the state of
Oklahoma to take water into the state of Texas. Competition of another sort is with our sister
state to the east, the state of Arkansas. In this case, it's not over water quantity,
it's over water quality. The state of Oklahoma feels that certain practices that are taking
place in the state of Arkansas are having a negative impact on the water quality in
the Illinois River. And currently the Attorney Generals of the two states are pursuing an
understanding and agreement that will help to satisfy this dispute, and so we see water
competition in terms of water quantity or water quality.
Well, let's go outside of the state of Oklahoma and outside of the United States. Let's go
to China, and China is a very interesting case. We see that in China, four-fifths of
the water is in the southern part of the country, whereas half the people and two-thirds of
the agriculture is in the northern part of the country. And so again we have a disparity
where the water is not located in the same place as the population or the agriculture.
And so China there's been a number of consequences of this. For example, in Beijing it's reported
that the groundwater level in the area of Beijing has dropped 300 meters since the 1970s,
and that's a significant drop in the water table, the groundwater location. Same time
we see that because of this disparity of where the water is versus where the people and the
agriculture is, China is undertaking major projects to move water from one location to
another. They're looking at 2000 miles of tunnels and canals and different ways of conveying
the water to help move it from the south, where more of the water is, to the north,
where half the population and two-thirds of the agriculture is. So this is a case where
we have movement of the water within the country of China because of the disparity of where
the water is versus where the people and agriculture are.
Well, now let's think about when the water is located in different levels in different
countries, and one country might look to another country and say, I'd like to have some of
that water. If you look at this table, the center column indicates the amount of water
that a country has. And the column to the right indicates the percentage of that water
that they use. Canada has so much water that it uses only one percent of its water. The
United States has about one-tenth of the amount of water that Canada has, and so it uses 19%,
approaching 20% of its water. China, which obviously has a population much greater than
U.S. or Canada, has about a fourth as much water as the United States has. Water use
is lower per capita, and so it uses 16% of its water. And so as we look at this, we can
see that different countries have different amounts of water. Down lower in this table
we see that Egypt uses 97% of its water. It has to use every drop of water it has available.
And you might wonder, how can Libya use 300% of its water? How can it use more water than
it has? And that can be because of importing water from other areas, from other countries.
And it can be because they reuse their water because they have such a great demand relative
to the the supply that they have.
For example, the United States and Mexico--the United States has a heavy reliance in the
arid West on the water in that region, specifically the Colorado River water. And so the United
States pulls a good amount, the states and people in that area pull a good amount of
water from the Colorado River to the point that by the time the water gets the Colorado
River gets to Mexico, there is very little and almost no water remaining, and so that's
obviously it creates a potential conflict between the United States and Mexico. Mexico
needs water as well. And so you have treaties that come about between the countries to make
agreements about water use and water passage. Another example of multiple countries and
a water that flows through them is Ethiopia and Egypt. It turns out that the headwaters
where the water, the most upstream place where the water begins that helps to create the
Nile River is in Ethiopia, and then that water flows through the country of Egypt. Well,
Ethiopia needs water, but it turns out due to a pact, due to a treaty that was agreed
to many years ago under colonial times, Egypt has rights to the water that supersede the
rights of Ethiopia. So the Ethiopians have this uncomfortable situation of allowing this
water to flow through their country that they could have great use for because they need
to allow it to flow to Egypt. And you can understand how this could be a potential source
of conflict, and there are a number of other cases.
One other example would be Singapore and Malaysia. Singapore is a country, an island country,
a a city state, and it's just south of Malaysia. Well, it used to be that Singapore had to
rely upon water from Malaysia to meet the water demands for Singapore, and this was
an uncomfortable position. You're relying upon another country to provide you something
so valuable, so vital to livelihood as water. And Singapore struggled with what can we do
to address this? And so what Singapore decided to do was to rely upon water reuse. Singapore
now takes their wastewater, and they treat it to a very high level, and they put it back
in to their water supply system, and we call this water reuse or water reclamation. Now,
this didn't happen all at once. This happened over more than a decade of time, and there
was public education. There was public awareness. There were demonstration projects, but the
city of Singapore now has developed water independence. We talk about oil independence,
not relying upon other countries for oil. Well, Singapore wanted to be water independent
and took this step to enable it to do so.
So we've talked about how water can be a potential source of competition, multiple countries
needing water, one country wanting water that another country has. It's an interesting fact,
though, that whereas in many other resources we can think of, mineral resources or oil
or any and other resources, where these competition leads to conflict, water has a unique characteristic
in that it's been found that often water leads to cooperation or agreements. And so a colleague,
Aaron Wolf at Oregon State University, has documented over 300 international treaties
that have come together where multiple countries are agreeing on the distribution of water
to meet the mutual needs. And so we see that water has a special characteristic to it that
tends to bring cooperation, whereas in other settings we might see conflict result as the
countries are vying over limited resources. So water has potential competition, potential
conflict, but also has the potential to bring countries together, and so water is very unique
in this respect.