Abstract
Humanity’s alteration of Earth has resulted in the onset of the Anthropocene which brings with it severe threats to the natural environment, especially regarding freshwater resources. With existing freshwater sources increasingly scarce, degraded, and altered around the globe, competition over what limited available sources remain is mounting. Transboundary rivers, lakes and aquifers are sources of competition and disputes between states as to their use and management. Certain recent inter-state disputes have fed the popular media rhetoric of “water wars” being fought in the future. However, this overlooks recorded history and a general global trend towards international water agreements and basin institutions favouring diplomatic channels over armed conflict. Two global water conventions are now in force, but whether these are widely implemented, thereby facilitating transboundary cooperation, remains to be seen. This paper argues for a research agenda into how two global water conventions can support basin agreements and institutions to better regulate inter-state sharing over finite resources and strengthen dispute resolution mechanisms to avoid or resolve conflicts over transboundary waters in the Anthropocene.
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Notes
- 1.
The UNECE Water Convention was originally negotiated as a regional instrument and was only open to accession from UNECE member states, comprising 56 countries located in the European Union (EU), non-EU Western Europe, South-East Europe, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia and North America. Given the global aspirations of the Convention to share it expertise with other basin regions around the world and promote transboundary water cooperation in the process, amendments to the Convention were adopted that entered into force on 6 February 2013 which now allows any state from around the world, not only UNECE member states, to become a party to the Convention. Senegal and Chad are the first non-UNECE states to have already acceded to the Convention.
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Kinna, R. (2019). International Water Law in Multi-scale Governance of Shared Waters in the Anthropocene: Towards Cooperation, not “Water Wars”. In: Lim, M. (eds) Charting Environmental Law Futures in the Anthropocene. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9065-4_9
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