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 of West Texas to the place where it's a tributary
to the Rio Grande.
Now, this case of Pecos has been settled through the Supreme Court of the United States.
I have a Supreme Court appointment called Pecos River Master or River Master of the
Pecos River which was conferred on me by the US Supreme Court as a way to resolve the conflicts
which continue to arise on the Pecos.
With these images you see a few pictures of the Supreme Court, the building here, the
nine justices that are currently serving here (actually it's not completely up to date but
a recent set of nine judges), then down below you see Justice Byron White who is now passed
away but was a local Colorado Native, grew up around Fort Collins here, became a football
star at the University of Colorado, later worked in the Department of Justice with Bobby
Kennedy, and was appointed as a Justice to the US Supreme Court by President John F Kennedy.
This is the highest level, the highest judicial level of the United States the eventually
came into play to resolve this conflict.
The way that it worked is that the water shortages were already evident by the 1900s.
By that time there was already an interstate conflict over how to divide that water.
Out here in the west, there's many cases of that but it's true all over the world in the
same way.
They started trying to resolve those conflicts early on.
One of the mechanisms that was put into place to try to resolve that in the 1930s that boundary
reservoir called Red Bluff Reservoir was constructed.
Then, in 1948, the two states and the federal government reached an Interstate Compact which
was actually approved by Congress which is the way Interstate Compacts work in the United
States.
Any kind of Interstate Compact, including water compacts, which by the way are one of
the best examples of the use of that part of the US Constitution of agreements between
states is of sharing the water.
But this interstate compact didn't work out the way that they envisioned, so 25 years
later, in 1973, the State of Texas filed a lawsuit in the US Supreme Court.
It's called Texas vs New Mexico #73 Original, originating in the Supreme Court.
They filed a lawsuit saying that New Mexico was not fulfilling its obligations under the
compact of the treaty.
A trial ensued.
That trial played out under a series of special masters appointed by the Supreme Court.
In 1988 they issued, the Supreme Court issued an amended decree which contained a rule,
how to administer the river through a Pecos River Master's Manual and included the provision
to appoint a River Master for the Pecos River to resolve disputes and to prepare annual
reports of New Mexico's water deliver to Texas under the compact.
In 2013, as a River Master, I delivered the 25th annual report and this institutional
mechanism seems to be working relatively well on the basis of the absence of conflicts that
can't be resolved.
Those were some examples of the transboundary conflicts.
There are many examples also of the interbasin transfers but the bottom line is that they're
usually legal but also usually contentious.
There's a Colorado Supreme Court case which enables and empowers and provides the basis
for the legality of interbasin transfers.
I'll mention that in just a second.
I would like to say that these interbasin transfers are contentious in humid areas such
as the eastern United States just as well as arid areas such as the western part of
the United States.
It's a very difficult situation, hard to handle, and requires careful management to work them
out.
But even with careful management, we're not liable to get rid of all of the conflicts
with it.
The court case which is very interesting in case you would like to look into some water
law and we'll have some discussion in other parts of this course about water law, the
court case was in the Colorado Supreme Court in 1882.
It was Coffin vs the Left Hand Ditch Company.
Basically it was a case about whether the interbasin transfer was legal or not.
They decided that it is legal.
You can do it.
That's the limits of the court ruling of course, but then this precedence of the case in the
Colorado Supreme Court goes on in many other legal and judicial venues to have established
this legality of interbasin transfer.
It doesn't get rid of the fact that it's contentious, but it does establish it as basically legal.
But, it's not always legal.
It can be prohibited in some cases.
Here's an example where interbasin transfer from the Great Lakes was prohibited in this
bill of the US House of Representatives where this Great Lakes Compact was coming into approval
being negotiated by the states and the two countries.
The legality of interbasin transfers was part of the compact was ruled out, which illustrates
that even in humid areas where it seems like you have a tremendous amount of water, still
interbasin transfer is not going to be allowed in some cases.
Looking at it from the bottom line again and sort of going back to where we started, thinking
about transboundary conflicts of water and interbasin transfer conflicts, it's difficult
to allocate water resources either using market mechanisms or governmental state based mechanisms.
There are many scenarios where these come up involving a lot of different groups of
people, stakeholders.
The conflicts are inevitable.
You need the conflict resolution methods and mechanisms if you don't have effective ones,
special interests are going to get their way and that will work against what we need, which
is integrated water resources management and effective governance systems.
We talked about the governance that's needed and why it's needs to involve fundamental
institutions of the government starting with the rule of law, peace, ways to resolve conflict
all through societies where a lot of different institutional mechanisms, organizations, plans,
and strategies, you need all of that if you're going to be able to work out these water conflicts.
They occur at these different scales.
I explained earlier about the smallest scales and the simplest types of problems up to the
most complex, involving multiple countries, many different interest groups, high levels
of technical complexity, high levels of institutional complexity.
As we look toward the future, we have to keep working on both technical advances and institutional
advances to address these many site specific problems which occur.
The biggest challenge is governance.
It's a challenge if we're going to address the human problems and environmental problems
like sustainability to come up with solutions where we share the water and we make it adequate
for systems that are interdependent.
This is going to require cooperative solutions, challenge, make them work in the face of all
this self-interest that we talked about before.
As I wrap up this session, I return one more time to the quote I started with from the
World Water Assessment Program, "In many countries water governance is in a state of confusion."
We have to work against that.
Come up with not confusion.
Work against confusion and come up with clear systems that work for everybody, that work
in the midst of the reality of self-interest.
But it's a challenge.
That's what we're faced with, with conflict resolution in water resources.