Last summer, after walking for days to a refugee camp across the South Sudan border, some Sudanese refugees reportedly chose to dig holes to reach muddy water rather than face the fist-fights breaking out around a failing tap. Boreholes dug by aid agencies collapsed in the crumbling soil. Even the coming rainy season brought more challenges than relief, washing out roads used by water tanker trucks and threatening the camp with flooding.
Although an extreme example, the desperation and fighting at Jamam refugee camp are expected to become increasingly common as climate change, environmental degradation and a booming population put greater strain on water resources globally. In the face of these water crises, the United Nations, NGOs and governments are sounding the alarm that water is no longer simply a humanitarian or environmental concern; it is a dire security matter as well.
This emerging focus on water security extends far beyond having enough drinking water. Water can be both a source of nourishment and of destruction, which means getting a handle on what exactly a water-secure world would look like is challenging. To that end, UN-Water, the United Nations’ coordinating mechanism for all water-related issues, recently defined the term.
Water security, UN-Water explained, is “the capacity of a population to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities of acceptable quality water for sustaining livelihoods, human well-being, and socio-economic development, for ensuring protection against water-borne pollution and water-related disasters, and for preserving ecosystems in a climate of peace and political stability.”
New Recognition
UN-Water’s definition was the starting point for a report titled “Water Security and the Global Water Agenda,” which addressed the scope and potential responses for water security issues, thereby sparking a dialogue on how to address and incorporate water security concerns within the UN and its work.
Although the idea of water security is not new, the application of this concept to the global community as a whole—as opposed to an individual country or community—is an ongoing, arduous task. UN-Water’s definition of what water security would look like from a global standpoint was three years in the making.
Yet UN-Water’s efforts continue a trend of examining the full scope of how water issues intersect with broader concerns, as well as the recent recognition of the complex connections between conflict and issues not traditionally tied to security, such as climate and food security.
“Attention to water security has definitely been on the rise in recent years,” says Harriet Bigas, a project officer for UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health, who prepared the UN-Water report.
“The last few years in particular have seen the discourse evolve to include references to water security as it relates to political security and stability, and the potential for conflicts to occur for water-related reasons. So this is something different that we weren’t seeing five or 10 years ago, when the discourse on water security focused more on development, economic growth, ecosystems and meeting basic needs for human health and well-being,” Bigas says.
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