Political Waters Series
INWRDAM’s Political Waters Series is an attempt to describe the complexities of transboundary water conflicts and disputes over the precious and vital source of water itself. Focus is set on shared water resources of INWRDAM’s network partner countries in form of basins and watersheds and associated cross border hydro diplomacy. The goal is to clearly identify how decision-making affects and impacts water resources in the scheme of upstream and downstream countries. By intensely analyzing shared watersheds from a current point of view perspective and comparing it with past developments in the area, by introducing solutions/starting points for collaboration that can be identified/drawn. The nature of disputes over transboundary waters are either silenced conflicts or the active usage of water as a tool for dominance. Most of the time, these conflicts are severely aggravated by the impacts of climate change, such as increasing temperature levels, higher occurrence of extreme weather events and rising sea level. The huge disparities between upstream and downstream countries in terms of water availability makes it often very hard to find common grounds. In the end, the people who will mostly suffer from these conflicts in the face of a changing climate are the poorest of poor and most vulnerable communities in rural and deltaic regions of the shared basins across the globe. Until now, the Political Waters Series published three articles; Dams are Temples of Modern India with special focus on the Indus Water Basin, South Asia & MENA Problemsheds and Euphrates-Tigris River Basin – Weaponization of Water, of which all are available on our network’s website https://inwrdam.net/. After delineating the current status quo of each shared basin, recommendations, proactive solutions and approaches at the social level are given, based on INWRDAM’s hydro-diplomatic expertise, as well as state of the art of transboundary water management.
The overall goal of the Political Waters Series is to foster and strengthen trans-frontiere water-cooperation and to establish communication bridges. In addition, the preparation of the Political Waters Series will serve as an asset for the conducting of INWRDAM’s network meeting on the 2nd and 3rd of February 2020 by crystallizing main working areas for cooperation between network partners in the field of shared waters.