7 - Water conflict prevention and resolution: Where to from here?

Summary

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.

– Loren Eisely, The Immense Journey

WHY MIGHT THE FUTURE LOOK NOTHING LIKE THE PAST?

This book is partly based on the assumption that we can tell something about the future by looking at the past. This assumption is not unassailable. Thus, it is worth stopping at this point and challenging its foundation. Why might the future look nothing at all like the past? What new approaches or technologies are on the horizon to change or ameliorate the risk to the basins we reviewed or even to the whole approach to basins at risk?

By definition, a discussion of the future cannot have the same empirical backing as a historical study – the data just do not yet exist. Yet there are cutting-edge developments and recent trends that, if one examined them within the context of this study, might suggest some possible changes in store for transboundary waters in the near future. What follows, then, are four possible fundamental changes in the way we approach international and/or transboundary waters.

New technologies for negotiation and management

Most analysis of international waters dates from the mid-1960s onward. In some ways, water management now is very similar to how it was then (or, for that matter, as it was 5,000 years ago). But some fundamental aspects are profoundly different.