Hello, I'm Neil Grigg.
I'm in the Department of Civil Engineering at Colorado State University.
This session is going to be about conflicts and diplomacy in water resources.
I'm a professor in the department of Civil Engineering, as I mentioned.
Normally, you would think of that as a technical engineering department, which it is.
But, over the years as I've worked in water resources and many different situations, I've
found that conflicts block solutions more than technical issues do.
In this session, and in another one, I want to focus on the nature of these conflicts,
why they block integrated management, and what we can do about it.
The dilemma is that water resources involve a lot of interconnected issues.
There are two attributes of water that are unique among complex systems.
One is, there's so many demands on water for so many different uses, that we inevitably
come into conflicts about the use of water.
The second aspect of water which is unique is that it travels from one group of people
to another as it moves through the hydrologic cycle.
It's like we're interconnected even if we don't want to be.
When you think about human nature and the nature of business and organizations, and
what might cause some of the problems we have with conflicts, you can see that there are
two types of issues that really block solutions.
The first is self-interest.
We're all working toward our own interests whether financial or value systems or whatever.
We'll take the actions that seem to make more sense to us.
The other is organizational self-interest in the sense that the organizations have power
structures and incentives that cause them to act in their own interest rather than in
community interest.
The other aspect to water is what you might even think about as a type of government failure.
We have stovepipes between the different levels of government and between governments at the
same level like county and city governments.
They don't line up with watersheds.
There are a lot of governmental problems that block integrated solutions.
When you think the integrated water management and the nature of these conflicts, it's natural
to go right away to the watershed as a place where you can see these many different aspects
of water management coming together.
As I mentioned, these different types of demands on water, you can see those in a diagram of
a watershed where there's conflicts between cities and farms, recreational uses of water
and so.
Then, think about upstream and downstream conflicts and pretty soon you get the picture.
These are sort of age old dilemmas.
In fact, this diagram goes back to the 1950s as a way to explain to people what's going
on with water conflicts.
When we are looking at why we have to integrate our management and how we really need to resolve
our conflicts, you can see all these different demands on water which you've been hearing
about in this course already: water scarcity, water for food, health issues, environmental
needs for water, habitats, and even disasters where one aspect of water management will
turn around and either lead to a disaster, like a dam failure, or it may, the disaster
aspect may block the other uses of it.
The coordination required for all of these is very complex as you can imagine.
What happens is that these conflicts happen.
They require solutions through what we call governance.
Governance sounds like government, but it means something else.
You're supposed to have in the course here, a special session on governance where we explain
in more detail.
To me, it's the operations of government as government goes about, resolving conflicts,
managing resources, and solving problems in different ways.
With more management, a number of issues come to fore.
One is allocating resources and water resources.
That's probably one of the major conflict arenas.
You also have conflicts that arise between what government does in the public sector
and what the private sector can do, such as an industry or a business of any kind that
needs water.
I already mentioned that water is unique and essential to all of our uses.
To come up with systems that can help us solve all of these different problems, we have to
have ways to value water.
That's another source of difficulty because people see different value systems when they
try to give their opinion on how to allocate water resources.
Integration is needed.
It really boils down to effective coordination between all of these different demands and
uses, how to do that coordination in the face of market failure and government failure.
By the way, there's a field called Public Choice which has come about in an attempt
to bridge the gap between market failure and government failure and to be realistic about
how government officials and private business people operate and make decisions as they
go along.
The challenge is how to do it.
This is a formidable challenge as you can imagine.
We'll talk a little about that in this session and in the next one.
To review that, the conflicts are those that are the reasons that we have the problems.
They're more serious than science or technical solutions, even money sometimes can't unblock
these conflicts that we've got.
The conflicts are widespread.
They occur from small scale settings like that watershed I showed to large settings
like river basins or even nations.
The solution should be effective water governance, but we don't know how to do that yet and we
need to figure it out.
I mentioned that governance is the actions of government to employ the process of governing
to solve human needs.
A more detailed definition is that governance involves the authority to manage water affairs
as it is applied to the sector of water resources.
Governance is going to be applied in every sector of human endeavor.
What we're talking about is applying it in the category of water affairs.
For a longer definition of it, you see there a quote from the global water partnership
where they say that governance involves a "range of political, social, economic, and
administrative systems to develop and manage water resources and water services at different
levels of society."
I find long definitions like that to be hard to work with because when you try to wrap
so many concepts into one definition you start to lose sight of the big picture.
The bottom line is that in a lot of places, this governance isn't working well.
At the bottom I have another quote this time from the World Water Assessment Programme,
which is part of the United Nations UNESCO system, "In many countries water governance
is in a state of confusion."
You can imagine how that would be the case when you look at a lot of political difficulties
in countries around the world.
It's a miracle that we can manage water even at a basic level, but it's essential to solve
that problem and bridge the gaps that are there.
I want to give you a few examples.
When we talk about governance and integrated water management and conflicts, these are
all abstract concepts.
We need to look at examples in order to see how it really plays out.
One example is the Colorado River which is famous in the western United States as needing
governance but also involving many conflicts.
I have two maps here, the top one a geophysical map where you can get an idea of the aridity
and the elevation in the western part of the United States.
Then, where the rivers drain on the bottom.
You can see that the Colorado River drains the southwestern part of the United States,
seven states more or less, and into Mexico.
When you think about the dependence of that part of the country on that river, you get
an idea of how critical it is that we can resolve those conflicts and manage the river.
What you're going to see on the Colorado River is conflicts between water users, conflicts
between different states, and even conflicts between the United States as a nation and
Mexico as a nation.
I don't think I mentioned conflicts between value systems of these different uses, but
it's quite (as you can imagine) quite a long story about the conflicts on the Colorado
River and how these mechanisms of governance and conflict resolution have been implemented
to try and resolve them.
Here's another map of the Colorado River Basin.
It's got a little more detail in it.
I just wanted to show this one to illustrate some of the features of the river and some
the aspects of the conflict resolution.
It even comes into play up in the part of the basin where we live.
If you look and see the cursor of the computer up near Fort Collins, then in Denver here.
We have large interbasin transfers of water out of the upper Colorado River before the
water even starts to flow downstream.
Then you have a group of states that are referred to as the Upper Basin States, then others,
Lower Basin States.
Then we have a dividing point with a boundary reservoir which is one of the concepts and
infrastructure systems that are usually necessary to help resolve these different conflicts
there.
In the upper right there you can see a recent study done by US Federal Agency, the Bureau
of Reclamation, to try to quantify some of the issues.
You can imagine that if the water hadn't been divided in the past between the Upper Basin
and Lower Basin states, if you have climate change and less water in some areas than in
the past, how that's going to make the controversies worse.
The bottom line on conflict resolution and governance is that what has evolved is something
called the Law of the River, which is very complex but in order to see how the Colorado
River is actually managed, you'd have to look at the whole Law of the River.
The Colorado River example is one.
You'll hear that discussed a lot in other sections of the course.
Globally, we have many issues which are similar to that.
Competition between the people, the water uses, or areas.
You need the laws and rules like the Law of the River on the Colorado.
But these laws and rules do not cross national boundaries or even state boundaries, easily,
which exacerbates the conflicts and means that we really don't have good ways to resolve
those conflicts other than some kind of formal mechanism like a court case.
When we think about how to classify these different issues, they'll fall into categories
so that we can understand them and not necessarily have to look at every case across the world
and think that it's unique.
They involve local watersheds of varied sizes with a lot of different conflicts, boating
vs fishing, use of water for irrigation, keeping a reservoir empty for flood control, many
issues like that.
Then, you can have larger scale systems like a regional river basin.
You can have upstream/downstream types of issues.
I'll give you a couple of examples of those.
Then, you can have larger scale transboundary issues where the water issues transfer across
basins from one state to another.
Actually, that would be the transboundary across jurisdictions.
The ones where you transfer water from one basin to another, we're going to look at that
as an interbasin issue, interbasin transfer conflict, as being a different type of an
issue than when the water flows across a state line or a national boundary.
Looking at those, in local watersheds, there are a lot of resources for this.
The US Environmental Protection Agency has developed a tremendous resource to explain
local watershed types of problems.
I use this extensively in my course trying to explain what's going on with watersheds
and all the many different issues that have to be confronted if we're going to get some
solutions there.
This graphic that you see here shows the watershed, hydrologically you can define what a watershed
is, you can look at what the issues are there and, to make a long story short, watershed
management is a field of study and knowledge which is really essential to begin to resolve
the conflicts in places like the watersheds shown.
Then, when you scale that up to a river basin that might be larger, like at a regional scale.
We could go over for example to Australia and look at the famous river basin called
Murray-Darling.
It drains down toward Adelaide as you can see.
It drains some of the most important parts of Australia, the southeastern part where
the seat of government is and a lot of economic activity is.
What they found in recent years is that the river had been over allocated.
You can actually see that in the hydrographs as you see go from earlier times to current
times.
I don't have enough time to explain that in detail, but what you would see is that the
demands on water have been growing and the supply of water has actually been going down
recently with a lot of drought, and with net results being a lot of conflicts that weren't
resolved.
Australia put into place a new group of water policies.
They created water markets that they hadn't had before.
In many ways, they revolutionized water management to come to grips with these shortages and
problems that have occurred.
Here's another river basin, international, the one on the Murray-Darling was a national
case but it went from one state to another.
At the international level, like the Mekong River Basin, you can have a different scale
of problem.
This map shows how the Mekong starts up in China, flows down through Laos and Thailand,
Cambodia, and eventually down into the Vietnam area where you have the Mekong Delta there.
As a mechanism to try to resolve the conflicts on the Mekong, there's been an institution
in operation since the late 1940s I believe, it's called Mekong River Commission.
You see a picture of their governing council.
That's an attempt to use a governance mechanism to resolve the conflicts on the large river
basin.
As you can imagine, it's not entirely successful, but at least it's a start to resolve these
conflicts.
Here's one which I use in my class in Water Resources Management to explain some social
issues and conflicts that turned out to be so difficult that they actually created some
political developments that were unknown to me in the past.
This is the Sao Francisco River Basin which is in Brazil.
The river flows from south to north.
The south part of the river basin is a highly industrialized populated region, rich region,
Brazil.
Where it flows into the sea in the north is a poor, drier region.
You can imagine trying to come to grips with the disparities between the value systems
of these different parts would be difficult for them.
Many conflicts, many issues, especially social justice.
Credit for this case study and the information goes to one of our graduates from Colorado
State, Jerson Kelman, who actually became the director of the National Water Agency
in Brazil and has explained this case study to us.
The case study involved a hunger strike by a Catholic priest who was fighting for social
justice as he understood it.
He reached the top level of the president of the country with his hunger strike.
Basically, it was about a proposed interbasin transfer of water out of the basin and it
continues even as we speak, as a national priority to try to find a solution to it.
Famous around the world of course is the Nile River because of all of the pictures that
you see, the different stories that come out of Africa.
I have a lot of information on it.
In the next session, I'll explain that in a little more detail.
Here you see a map of the Nile River.
You see the headwaters of the White Nile that are down on the bottom of the picture.
The river flows from south to north.
The river system on the bottom is called the White Nile.
It flows out of the Lake Victoria region from Tanzania and Uganda, Kenya, and those countries
to the north through a great swamp into Sudan, and then it's joined by the Blue Nile that
starts in Ethiopia.
The two together form the Nile River which flows into Egypt.
Egypt especially with its large population and many issues depends so much on the Nile
River and the long story, which you can imagine the many conflicts that had developed and
continue to require a lot of attention for resolution.
Another large scale river system like those I've just discussed, very famous, is the Brahmaputra-Ganges
system.
Here the waters are shared by China, India, and Bangladesh.
You can see the Brahmaputra system here going through China and then down into Bangladesh
and India.
You can see the Ganges system coming in over here and coming together.
You can imagine all the conflicts that come about in trying to provide for the quality
of life and environment in this large river system.
China, with its growing population wanting to tap the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra.
Bangladesh needing the water resources for irrigation during drought season, but also
being concerned about the large flooding during the wet season, monsoon season.
India considering the Ganges and others to be like a holy river, having special spiritual
qualities and needing to enter into compacts and agreements with those other countries.
Just like the Nile River and the Colorado River, you can go back and see the history
of this river system and you will find many things that have occurred over centuries to
work those problems out.
Just to wrap this session up, the big picture is that it's very difficult to allocate the
resources provided by water either through market mechanisms or government, the state.
You have many scenarios of conflict, from the smallest scenarios to the largest scale
problems.
A lot of different stakeholder groups.
The conflicts are just inevitable, but what's lacking with water conflicts is conflict resolution
mechanisms.
Often, special interests who are powerful can roll over our attempts to create integrated
solutions.
In the end, the only thing that works for everybody is integrated solutions which are
based on effective governance.
That's why, when I started this session, I said that whereas technical approaches are
necessary, you're not going to be able to come to full solutions to these problems without
effective governance.
I explained a little of what governance is and you'll hear more about it in other sessions
of this course.
This is a little block diagram which I created in a simple way to explain what's involved
with water governance where you've got to have fundamental institutions that undergird
your system like the rule of law and then you go through the different aspects of governance
if you're going to have outcomes that work for everyone.
I explained how you have different scales where water conflicts play out.
In the simplest case, you have few issues, few governments involved, and you might have
some kind of problem like a single jurisdiction, municipal water supply that can be worked
out.
As you carry the complexity ahead involving more governance, more governments with greater
institutional complexity, then you have more issues technically speaking.
You get into large scale problems like those river basins that I mentioned.
We can look at others too, like the Danube in Iran and Europe or the Great Lakes in the
United States and Canada.
What I'll talk about next is two common scenarios.
One, the interbasin transfer, where we're moving water from one basin to another, usually
permanently, and the second where water flows across some kind of governmental jurisdictional
boundary where you need some kind of agreement where things can be worked out.
Thank you for listening and you'll see me again in the next session.