- Annex 71: Farinosi F., Gonzalez-Sanchez, D., Crestaz E., Cordano E., Carmona-Moreno C., Bidoglio G., 2017. Towards an African Atlas of Water Energy Food Cooperation – Data collection. JRC Technical Report, JRC108695, Ispra, European Commission
The database described in this Report is one of the first steps in the construction of the African Atlas of Water Cooperation. Main scope of the project is “to create a dynamic tool addressed to policy-makers to stress hotspots and cues on the potential disequilibrium in the different Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystem components under different climate variability scenarios, natural resource supply, socio-economic and human demand at River Basin scales in Africa”. By analyzing the interaction between water availability and uses at river basin scale, the tool is aimed at providing assistance to the efforts in the EC-Cooperation in Developing countries, and contribute to the development of the EU Migration Inclination Index.
The development of the tool is organized in a series of tasks. The first one, described in this report, attains to the collection of the main information available regarding the most important transboundary basins in the African continent. This reports proposes a data collection, the organization of a database, a brief but at the same time detailed description of the River basins selected, and presents a digital tool created to visualize and manage the information collected.
The database hereby presented has to be intended as a living entity that will be integrated and further developed during the activities planned for the development of the African water cooperation atlas. The information presented in this report will be integrated with data collected at global, regional, basin, and local scale. This task will benefit from the collaboration with African partner institutions and International Organizations.
- Annex 72: Farinosi F., Gonzalez-Sanchez D., Carmona Moreno C., Bidoglio G., 2017. Atlas of Water Cooperation and Conflicts. JRC Technical Report, JRC105326, Ispra, European Commission
The concept of Atlas of Water Conflict and Cooperation refers to an empirically based tool aimed at analyzing the interactions between biophysical and socio-economic factors able to influence cooperation or tensions over water in shared watersheds. The idea was to develop a tool able to monitor availability, uses and abuses of water and water-stressed hot spots at national and regional scales. This is not only directed at analyzing water supply and demand, as for a water stress indicator, but also the socio-economic, institutional, legal, and cultural context evolutions that are likely to influence the hydro-political tensions or cooperation.
The aim of this product is to provide the policy maker with a flexible instrument able to capture historical and current trends of factors relevant for water related issues, but also the possibility to interactively construct future scenarios and eventually simulate different sets of policy options and strategies.
This first version of the Atlas of Water Conflict and Cooperation is based on the global assessment of water related issues and their correlates in the interactions between countries sharing transboundary watersheds. The analysis is based on the information about the bi-lateral interactions of the countries sharing the existing 276 international river basins (IRCC database).
The Atlas is designed under a framework structured adopting concepts from political science and environmental economics. Three main groups of indicators are highlighted: river basin freshwater availability; human pressure on water resources; global restrains. A combination of econometric and statistical approaches and tools derived by machine learning have been used to test correlation and causality of the indicators from each of the three groups with historical episodes of water related tensions or cooperation. The relative impact of each time-varying and time-invariant indicator is in this way assessed and empirically estimated.
- Annex 73: Farinosi F., Giupponi C., Reynaud A., Ceccherini G., Carmona-Moreno C., De Roo A., Gonzalez-Sanchez D., Bidoglio G., 2018. An innovative approach to the assessment of hydro-political risk: A spatially explicit, data driven indicator of hydro-political issues. Glob Environ Change. 2018 Sep;52:286-313. doi: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2018.07.001
Competition over limited water resources is one of the main concerns for the coming decades. Although water
issues alone have not been the sole trigger for warfare in the past, tensions over freshwater management and use
represent one of the main concerns in political relations between riparian states and may exacerbate existing
tensions, increase regional instability and social unrest. Previous studies made great efforts to understand how
international water management problems were addressed by actors in a more cooperative or confrontational
way. In this study, we analyze what are the pre-conditions favoring the insurgence of water management issues
in shared water bodies, rather than focusing on the way water issues are then managed among actors. We do so
by proposing an innovative analysis of past episodes of conflict and cooperation over transboundary water
resources (jointly defined as “hydro-political interactions”). On the one hand, we aim at highlighting the factors
that are more relevant in determining water interactions across political boundaries. On the other hand, our
objective is to map and monitor the evolution of the likelihood of experiencing hydro-political interactions over
space and time, under changing socioeconomic and biophysical scenarios, through a spatially explicit data
driven index. Historical cross-border water interactions were used as indicators of the magnitude of corresponding water joint-management issues. These were correlated with information about river basin freshwater
availability, climate stress, human pressure on water resources, socioeconomic conditions (including institutional development and power imbalances), and topographic characteristics. This analysis allows for identification of the main factors that determine water interactions, such as water availability, population density,
power imbalances, and climatic stressors. The proposed model was used to map at high spatial resolution the
probability of experiencing hydro-political interactions worldwide. This baseline outline is then compared to
four distinct climate and population density projections aimed to estimate trends for hydro-political interactions
under future conditions (2050 and 2100), while considering two greenhouse gases emission scenarios (moderate
and extreme climate change). The combination of climate and population growth dynamics is expected to impact
negatively on the overall hydro-political risk by increasing the likelihood of water interactions in the transboundary river basins, with an average increase ranging between 74.9% (2050 – population and moderate
climate change) to 95% (2100 - population and extreme climate change). Future demographic and climatic
conditions are expected to exert particular pressure on already water stressed basins such as the Nile, the
Ganges/Brahmaputra, the Indus, the Tigris/Euphrates, and the Colorado. The results of this work allow us to
identify current and future areas where water issues are more likely to arise, and where cooperation over water
should be actively pursued to avoid possible tensions especially under changing environmental conditions. From
a policy perspective, the index presented in this study can be used to provide a sound quantitative basis to the
assessment of the Sustainable Development Goal 6, Target 6.5 “Water resources management”, and in particular
to indicator 6.5.2 “Transboundary cooperation”.