Conflict or cooperation? How does precipitation change affect transboundary hydropolitics?

Qifan Xia,Yang Zhang,Debin Du,Chaofeng Qian

doi:10.2166/wcc.2021.280

Abstract

Abstract Global climate change affects hydrology and ecology, and aggravates the contradiction between water resources supply and demand, thus leading to transboundary water conflict and cooperation attracting increasing attention. This paper uses the precipitation data sourced from the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre, hydropolitical data collected from the Transboundary Freshwater Disputes Database and, for approximately half a century of socioeconomic indicator for countries, to discuss the relationship between precipitation change and transboundary hydropolitics. As demonstrated by the panel regression results, lower precipitation would lead to more water conflicts and more significant change of precipitation would lead to more water hydropolitical events. This result remains robust after adjustment being made to the defined thresholds of conflict and cooperation. The findings suggest that the countries in a transboundary river ought to avoid conflict and seek more cooperation, considering the uncertain prospect of precipitation changes.

Highlights

Human society is always accompanied by conflict in the competition for resources
In order to verify the hypothesis that precipitation changes will affect hydropolitics, on the basis of maintaining data integrity and reliability, we constructed the abovementioned national panel data for almost half a century from 1960 to 2008
Global climate change is becoming more and more obvious, which leads to increasing attention of hydropolitics

Summary

Introduction

Human society is always accompanied by conflict in the competition for resources. When conflict turns violent, it can have significant consequences for the well-being of humans. Understanding the causes and solution of conflict has been a major project in the field of science. Under the context of global environmental change, climate has received increasing recognition as a significant cause of human conflicts (Carleton & Hsiang ). In the most recent years, plenty of literature has started to issue warnings against diminishing resources and potential social conflicts arising from climate change, which has a real possibility to alter the supply of a resource and result in disputes over the allocation of it.

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Conclusion