Landsats Aff

Water – Impact Helper – Escalation

Water wars will escalate—Middle East is uniquely susceptible to conflict: Death toll is in the billions.
Peterson 99 (Scott, Staff Writer @ Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/1999 /0714/p1s3.html/(page)/2, accessed 7/7/11) CJQ

With Israel's new Prime Minister Ehud Barak promising to restart peace with the Palestinians and Syria, the issue of water - often forgotten by outsiders, but all-important in the parched Holy Land - will take center stage. After all, destroying an enemy's water and its sources has been a strategic aim in every war fought in the Mideast during the past two generations. And severe water shortages here - the Middle East is experiencing its driest spell in 50 years - could complicate any talks. "If we solve every other problem in the Middle East but do not satisfactorily resolve the water problem, our region will explode," once warned the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, one of the architects of the Mideast peace process. As crops shrivel, river and reservoir levels drop, and new dams and competing claims loom, experts are striving to cope with dwindling water resources. "The Malthusian specter is real in the Middle East," says Thomas Stauffer, a Washington-based Mideast water and energy analyst. Water resources are "fully utilized," while the population continues to grow - ingredients the economist Malthus predicted would lead to conflict. "The consequences are profound. Scarcity means conflict, so oil wars are less likely than water wars." His concerns are echoed by the results of a two-year study carried out by the US National Academy of Sciences alongside Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian water experts. "Fresh-water supplies in the Middle East now are barely sufficient to maintain a quality standard of living," said Gilbert White, a University of Colorado geographer who led the team. Increasing water use across the largely arid region, the team found, guarantees that "the area's inhabitants will almost assuredly live under conditions of significant water stress in the near future." Already, at least 400 million people live in regions with severe water shortages. Within 50 years, that figure is expected to soar to 4 billion. There is no more water on the planet than there was 2,000 years ago, when the population was just 3 percent what it is today. "Our concerns about global warming are trivial compared to the issues that we face over water," a senior official of NASA's Earth Sciences Directorate has said.

Water – Impact – Spillover

Water wars go global—it's an essential resource; countries will do anything to maintain their stream. Internal conflicts mandate that countries lash out and guarantee that wars get bloodier.
Postel and Wolf 1 (Sandra and Aaron, Global Water Policy @ Amherst and Asst. Prof. Geo. @ OSU, http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/198/40343.html#postel, accessed 7/7/11) CJQ

Others argue, however, that when it comes to water the past will not be a reliable guide to the future. A renewable but not infinite resource, fresh water is becoming increasingly scarce: The amount available to the world today is almost the same as it was when the Mesopotamians traded blows, even as global demand has steadily increased. Just since 1950, the renewable supply per person has fallen 58 percent as world population has swelled from 2.5 billion to 6 billion. Moreover, unlike oil and most other strategic resources, fresh water has no substitute in most of its uses. It is essential for growing food, manufacturing goods, and safeguarding human health. And while history suggests that cooperation over water has been the norm, it has not been the rule. One fourth of water-related interactions during the last half century were hostile. Although the vast majority of these hostilities involved no more than verbal antagonism, rival countries went beyond name-calling on 37 recorded occasions and fired shots, blew up a dam, or undertook some other form of military action. Lost amidst this perennial debate over whether there will be water wars has been a serious effort to understand precisely how and why tensions develop, beyond the simplistic cause-and-effect equation that water shortages lead to wars. First, whether or not water scarcity causes outright warfare between nations in the years ahead, it already causes enough violence and conflict within nations to threaten social and political stability. And as recent events in the Balkans and sub-Saharan Africa demonstrated, today's civil conflicts have a nasty habit of spilling over borders and becoming tomorrow's international wars. Second, water disputes between countries, though typically not leading to war directly, have fueled decades of regional tensions, thwarted economic development, and risked provoking larger conflicts before eventually giving way to cooperation. The obsession with water wars begs more important questions: What are the early signs and likely locations of water-related disputes, and what can governments and international agents do to prevent the eruption of violence and political instability?

Water crises in one country affect the internal politics of those across the globe—small instabilities butterfly effect until whole governments are overthrown.
Economist 9 ("Water Shortages are a Growing Problem, but Not for the Reasons most People Think," http://www.economist.com/node/13447271, accessed 7/7/11) CJQ

THE overthrow of Madagascar’s president in mid-March was partly caused by water problems—in South Korea. Worried by the difficulties of increasing food supplies in its water-stressed homeland, Daewoo, a South Korean conglomerate, signed a deal to lease no less than half Madagascar’s arable land to grow grain for South Koreans. Widespread anger at the terms of the deal (the island’s people would have received practically nothing) contributed to the president’s unpopularity. One of the new leader’s first acts was to scrap the agreement. Three weeks before that, on the other side of the world, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California declared a state of emergency. Not for the first time, he threatened water rationing in the state. “It is clear,” says a recent report by the United Nations World Water Assessment Programme, “that urgent action is needed if we are to avoid a global water crisis.” Local water shortages are multiplying. Australia has suffered a decade-long drought. Brazil and South Africa, which depend on hydroelectric power, have suffered repeated brownouts because there is not enough water to drive the turbines properly. So much has been pumped out of the rivers that feed the Aral Sea in Central Asia that it collapsed in the 1980s and has barely begun to recover.by individual acts of mismanagement or regional problems, are one thing. A global water crisis, which impinges on supplies of food and other goods, or affects rivers and lakes everywhere, is quite another. Does the world really face a global problem?