Brahma Chellaney

The Straits Times | September 17, 2012

Asia’s water crisis is at the heart of the world’s water challenges, with  the degradation of surface and subterranean water resources threatening the natural ecosystems. Asia has the world’s lowest per capita access to freshwater. The continent’s ever-deeper search for water is sucking groundwater reserves dry with millions of pump-operated wells even as it confronts river depletion.

Groundwater is recklessly exploited because it is not visible to the human eye. What is out of sight tends to be out of mind, as people drill  deeper into the receding water table.

At least seven factors have contributed to the rising economic and security risks linked with the Asian water crisis.

One is Asia’s dramatic economic rise. With economic activity such as industry and food production consuming 92 percent of the world’s annual water use, Asia’s rapid economic growth has been the key driver of its growing water stress.

Asia already has the world’s largest number of people without basic or adequate access to water. Asian states are experiencing very high water-distribution losses, a lack of 24/7 supply in many cities, and drinking water contamination due to unregulated industrial and agricultural practices.

A second factor is consumption growth from rising prosperity. While Asia’s population growth has slowed, its consumption growth has taken off as Asians consume more resources like water, food and energy. A growing Asian middle class, for example, uses water-guzzling, energy-hogging comforts such as washing machines and dishwashers. What were once luxuries have become necessities today. In China, daily household water use increased two-and-a-half times between 1980 and 2000 alone.

The broader consumption growth is best illustrated by changing Asian diets, especially the greater intake of meat, which is notoriously water-intensive to produce. Asia actually accounts for the world’s fastest growth in meat consumption. China, Vietnam and Thailand almost doubled their production of pigs and poultry during the 1990s alone.

Growing biomass to feed animals takes far more water, energy and land than growing biomass for direct human consumption. Much of the world’s corn and soya bean production and a growing share of wheat now go to feed cattle, pigs and chickens.

Third is the role of irrigation. Irrigation has proven both a boon and a curse in Asia. Once a continent of serious food shortages and recurrent famines, Asia’s dramatic economic rise as a net food exporter came on the back of an unparalleled irrigation expansion. Between 1961 and 2003, Asia doubled its total irrigated acreage.

Extending agriculture to semi-arid and arid areas that stretch from northern China to Uzbekistan and beyond has required intensive irrigation. But this has created serious water-logging and soil salinity problems, and undercut crop-yield growth.

Even in Asia’s fertile valleys drained by major rivers, irrigation is often necessary in the dry season because the rains are usually restricted to the three- or four-month monsoon season. This is in stark contrast to Europe’s rain-fed crops producing most of its food.

With its vast irrigation systems, Asia now boasts much of the world’s land under irrigation. It has 70.2 percent of the world’s 301 million hectares of irrigated acreage.

Asia’s channelling of 82 percent of its water for food production is not the only startling statistic. Consider another astonishing figure: almost 74 per cent of the total global freshwater used for agriculture is in Asia alone. With so much water diverted to agriculture, water literally is food in Asia. Yet in the long term, such water use by Asia’s agricultural sector is simply unsustainable.

A fourth factor is the fast-rising water demand from Asian industry and urban households, as this continent becomes the world’s fastest industrialization and urbanization region.

With the international shift of manufacturing to Asia continuing, this continent’s industrial water usage is merely 9 percent of the total, with another 9 percent used for municipal supply. However, in East Asia — where Asia’s heavy manufacturing is concentrated — industrial water use already accounts for 22 percent of total supply, with municipal supply making up another 14 percent.

Greater water shortages are looming as industrial activities rapidly expand. The fast pace of urbanization has left many cities struggling to meet the household water demands.

A fifth factor behind Asia’s water crisis is the large-scale sequestration of river resources through dams, barrages, reservoirs and other human-made structures. This has been done without factoring in long-term environmental considerations and, in a number of cases, even the interests of countries located downstream.

Projects designed to offer structural solutions in the form of dams, reservoirs, irrigation canals and levees are often at the root of intrastate and interstate water disputes.

Asia is the world’s most dam-dotted continent, yet such over-damming has only compounded its water challenges. China alone boasts slightly more than half of the approximately 50,000 large dams on the planet.

Yet another factor is the environmental impact of Asia’s economic-growth story, including on watersheds, riparian ecology and water quality. Rising prosperity in Asia, by aggravating the environmental impacts of human activities, is deepening the water crisis.

State policies have unwittingly contributed to environmental degradation. State subsidies, for example, have helped weaken price signals, encouraging farmers to over-pump groundwater. Provision of subsidized electricity and diesel fuel to farmers in several Asian countries has promoted the uncontrolled exploitation of groundwater.

Water abstraction in excess of the natural hydrological cycle’s renewable capacity is affecting ecosystems and degrading water quality in large parts of Asia. The over-exploitation of groundwater, for example, results not only in the depletion of a vital resource, but also leads to the drying up of wetlands, lakes and streams that depend on the same source. The human alteration of ecosystems is an invitation to accelerated global warming.

A final factor is the lack of institutionalized cooperation over most of Asia’s transnational river basins. This reality has to be seen in the context of strained relations between states sharing river basins and the broader absence of an Asian security architecture.

Asia is the only continent other than Africa where regional integration has yet to take hold, largely because Asian political and cultural diversity has hindered institution building. As a result, managing the water competition in Asia has become increasingly challenging.

The writer is the author of “Water: Asia’s New Battlegroud.”

(c) The Straits Times, 2012.

Brahma Chellaney, The Economic Times, May 10, 2012

The Teesta River flowing through the northern part of India’s West Bengal state

With power in India shifting to the states due to an increasingly weak central government, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chose Calcutta as the first stop of her India tour to advance U.S. foreign-policy interests. In a televised interview before meeting with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamta Banerjee, Ms. Clinton pushed for India permitting foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail and for an “amicable” water-sharing arrangement with Bangladesh on the Teesta River — issues stalled by Ms. Banerjee’s opposition.

The art of persuasion and co-option is central to leadership — a capability Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has failed to demonstrate, even as his politically precarious government lurches from one crisis to another. The result has been a series of delays on critical decisions as well as policy reversals — all conveniently blamed on allies, including powerful regional satraps. This tendency to pass the buck has prompted foreign leaders to directly woo key chief ministers.

Take the water issue. The Indian Constitution has left water as a state-level subject, rather than making it a federal issue. Yet Singh’s government has sought to dictate the terms of a Teesta water-sharing treaty with Bangladesh to West Bengal, although that state’s interests are directly at stake. Indeed, New Delhi first negotiated the terms of the pact with Dhaka — generously loaded in Bangladesh’s favour — and then sought to present West Bengal with a fait accompli.

Respect for states and their interests is the essence of federalism.  Yet this inclination to ride roughshod over states harks back to the days when the central government was exceptionally strong.

Jawaharlal Nehru ignored the interests of Jammu and Kashmir and, to a lesser extent, Punjab when he signed the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, under which India bigheartedly agreed to the exclusive reservation of the largest three of the six Indus-system rivers for downstream Pakistan. In effect, India signed an extraordinary treaty indefinitely setting aside 80.52 percent of the Indus-system waters for Pakistan — the most generous water-sharing pact thus far in modern world history.

In fact, the volume of waters earmarked for Pakistan from India under the Indus treaty is more than 90 times greater that what the U.S. is required to release for Mexico under the 1944 U.S.-Mexico Water Treaty, which stipulates a minimum transboundary delivery of 1.85 billion cubic meters of the Colorado River waters yearly. While Ms. Clinton’s advocacy of a Teesta treaty is understandable, the U.S. hasn’t set a good example in the Colorado Basin. The  waters of the once-mighty Colorado River are siphoned by seven American states, leaving only a trickle for Mexico.

The Indus treaty was negotiated in a period when water shortages were relatively unknown in most parts of India. Nehru did not envisage that water resources would come under serious strain due to developmental and population pressures. Today, as the bulk of the Indus system’s waters continue to flow to an adversarial Pakistan waging a war by terror, India’s own Indus basin, according to the 2030 Water Resources Group, is reeling under a massive 52 percent deficit between water supply and demand.

Worse still, the Indus treaty has deprived Jammu and Kashmir of the only resource it has — water. The state’s three main rivers — the Chenab and the Jhelum (which boast the largest cross-border discharge of all the six Indus-system rivers) and the main Indus stream — have been reserved for Pakistan’s use, thereby promoting alienation and resentment in the Indian state.

This led the Jammu and Kashmir state legislature to pass a bipartisan resolution in 2002 calling for a review and annulment of the Indus treaty. To help allay popular resentment in the state over the major electricity shortages that are hampering its development, the central government subsequently embarked on hydropower projects like Baglihar and Kishenganga. But Pakistan — as if seeking to perpetuate the popular alienation in the Indian state — took the Baglihar project to a World Bank-appointed international neutral expert and Kishenganga to the International Court of Arbitration, which last year stayed all further work on the project.

The proposed Teesta pact suggests that India has learned no lesson from its experience over the Indus treaty. The Teesta originates in Sikkim state and meets the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh. The long-term interests of northern West Bengal, for which the Teesta is a lifeline, must be protected.

Water, as an indispensable resource that is increasingly in short supply, tends to raise emotive and politically surcharged issues. Singh’s government has unwisely brought India under pressure by portraying Ms. Banerjee as the sole holdout on the Teesta treaty. It has also fed the media attacks on Ms. Banerjee over that issue. Meanwhile, seeking to up the ante by latching on Ms. Clinton’s comments, Bangladesh Foreign Minister Dipu Moni has warned that Indo-Bangladesh ties “will take a huge hit” if India does not deliver on the Teesta issue.

India, which has just announced a decision to magnanimously write off $200 million of its $1 billion new loan to Dhaka, must continue to generously help Bangladesh — but on the basis of concrete reciprocity. India is already a party to a water-sharing treaty with Bangladesh involving a bigger river, the Ganges.

Its 1996 Ganges treaty guarantees Bangladesh minimum cross-border flows in the dry season — a new principle in international water relations. In fact, the treaty almost equally divides the downstream Ganges flows between the two countries. In concluding the treaty, India climbed down from its long-stated position that it needed a minimum of 40,000 cubic feet of water per second of time (“cusecs”) to flush silt from the Calcutta port. India settled for each side getting 35,000 cusecs of water in alternative ten-day periods during the driest period from March to May.

The treaty helped bury the hatchet over India’s diversion of water through the Farakka Barrage to a Ganges tributary, the Bhagirathi-Hooghly, to help flush silt and keep the Calcutta Harbour operational during the dry season. The treaty’s complex water-sharing arrangement is pivoted on joint oversight of flows to help build mutual trust. And unlike the Indus treaty, which was brokered by the U.S. and the World Bank, the Ganges treaty emerged without the involvement of a third party, despite a U.S. offer of mediation.

Bangladesh and India are also likely to sign — without any third-party role — a Teesta treaty in what will be the world’s first water-sharing pact of the 21st century. Bangladesh insists it get half of the Teesta waters, although most of the river’s waters are generated in India. Existing water-sharing treaties elsewhere in the world do not come anywhere close to allocating half of all waters to the downstream state. India has the dubious distinction of signing the most generous water-sharing pacts with downstream states, even as it has failed to get upstream China to  accept the very concept of water sharing.

India faces difficult choices on water. Unlike Bangladesh, it is already a water-stressed country. Whereas the per-capita water availability in Bangladesh is 8,252 cubic meters per year, according to United Nations data, it has fallen to a paltry 1,560 cubic meters in India.

(c) The Economic Times, 2012.

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times, April 18, 2012

The Centrality of the Tibetan Plateau in Asia's Water Map
(c) Brahma Chellaney, "Water: Asia's New Battleground" (Georgetown University Press).

Dam building on shared rivers has emerged as the leading source of water disputes and tensions in Asia, the world’s driest continent whose freshwater availability is less than half the global annual average of 6,380 cubic meters per inhabitant. Dam-building activities by China and Central, South and Southeast Asian states have roiled inter-riparian relations, intensifying water discord and impeding broader regional cooperation and integration.

Dam building has largely petered out in the West, but continues in full swing in Asia.

According to international projections, the total number of dams in the developed countries in the next one decade is likely to remain about the same, while much of the dam building in the developing world, in terms of aggregate storage-capacity buildup, is expected to be concentrated in just one country — China. Indeed, about four-fifths of all dams currently under construction in Asia are just in China, which already boasts slightly more than half of all existing large dams in the world.

In the United States — the world’s second most dammed country after China — the rate of decommissioning of dams has overtaken the pace of building new ones. Yet the numerous new dam projects in Asia show that the damming of rivers is still an important priority for national and provincial policymakers. This reflects their insistence on engineering potential solutions to the water shortages.

Dams bring important benefits. If adequately sized and designed, dams can aid economic and social development by regulating water supply, controlling floods, facilitating irrigation and storing water in the wet season for release in the dry season. In addition, they can help generate hydroelectricity and bring drinking water to cities, when designed for such purposes.

But upstream dams on shared rivers in an era of growing water stress often carry broader political and social implications, especially because they can affect the quality and quantity of downstream flows. Dams, by often altering fluvial ecosystems and damaging biodiversity, also carry other environmental costs.

At a number of sites in Asia, dam building has triggered grassroots opposition over the submergence of land and the displacement of residents. Such opposition tends to be effectively stifled in autocracies. Democracies, by contrast, struggle to placate the local resistance.

For example, the future of the $5.62-billion Yanba Dam project in Japan remains uncertain. Popular opposition led to a two-year freeze before the project was recently resurrected by the government, although the ruling Democratic Party of Japan had labeled the dam in its election manifesto as a “wasteful public-works scheme.” Plans for this dam were conceived six decades ago, but public controversies have continued to weigh down the project.

The Yanba Dam — Japan’s largest dam-construction project by value — is designed to combat Agatsuma River flooding and supply drinking water to Tokyo and surrounding areas.

In another democracy, South Korea, the so-called Four Major Rivers Restoration Project launched by President Lee Myung Bak in early 2009 has proven a nationally divisive issue. The project has involved the building of more dams and barrages in a country that already boasts more than 800 large dams and 18,000 small irrigation reservoirs, with artificial lakes making up almost 95 percent of all the lakes.

The project’s high price tag — it will cost taxpayers almost $20 billion — has also fueled public controversies. The project was originally centered on the country’s four main rivers — the Han, the Nag Dong, the Kuem, and the Young San — but later the southern Seom Jin River was also added.

In India, a large, raucous democracy, such is the power of nongovernment organizations and citizens groups to organize grassroots protests that it has now become virtually impossible to build a large dam, blighting the promise of hydropower. Proof of this was the Indian government’s decision in 2010 to abandon three dam projects on the Bhagirathi River, including one midway. That project was scrapped on environmental grounds after authorities had already spent $139 million at the project site and ordered equipment worth $288 million. The decision represented a huge loss of taxpayer money.

The largest dam India has constructed since independence is the 2,000 megawatt (MW) Tehri, which pales in comparison to the giant Chinese projects, such as the more than nine-times-bigger Three Gorges Dam or even the new Chinese dams built or under construction on the Mekong.

The 1,450 MW Narmada Dam in west-central India has been under construction for decades. The project has sparked an unending war between environmental groups and authorities. Like Japan’s Yanba Dam, the Indian plan to harness the 1,300-km Narmada River dates back to the 1940s.

The legal, logistical, bureaucratic, political and NGO-activist hurdles the Narmada project has faced reflect the true reality in building any large dam in a country as politically diverse and open as India. Yet the country’s Supreme Court recently ordered the government to revive a decade-old plan to link up the important rivers in two separate grids — one in the north and the other in the south. Given India’s troubles over the Narmada Dam, it is an open question whether the grand river-linking plans will be realized.

In Southeast Asia, dam-building disputes fall in two categories. First, there is a clear divide between the lower-riparian states and China over the unilateral Chinese harnessing of the resources of the Mekong, with the smaller and weaker down-river states unable to persuade Beijing to halt or even slow its construction of dams on that transnational river. Second, dam building in the lower basin — although on a much smaller scale than by China — has also stoked controversies.

The damming plans of Laos, which wants to be the “battery” of Southeast Asia, have been driven by a desire to earn hydro-dollars through the export of electricity, mainly to China. Indeed, most of the planned Laotian and Cambodian dams involve Chinese financial, design or engineering assistance. Thailand’s own hydro-development plans have further muddied the picture.

Vietnam, located farthest downstream, has the most to lose. Laos, responding to growing regional concerns, agreed last year to defer building its largest project, the 1,260 MW Sayabouly Dam, until an expert review has been completed.

China’s construction of mega-dams, however, continues unabated. After recently commissioning the 4,200 MW Xiaowan, which dwarfs Paris’ Eiffel Tower in height, it is racing to complete yet another giant dam on the Mekong — the 5,850 MW Nuozhadu. The state-run HydroChina Corporation has unveiled a plan to build a dam more than two times as large as the Three Gorges Dam at Metog (“Motuo” in Chinese), close to the disputed, heavily militarized border with India.

Such is the growing interstate competition over water resources that even run-of-river projects have become a source of inter-riparian tensions, although, unlike multipurpose storage dams, they generally do not alter cross-border flows. Such dams are mostly small in scale and employ a river’s natural flow and elevation drop to produce electricity, without the aid of a large reservoir or dam. Even their environmental impact is minimal.

In recent years, Pakistan invoked provisions of the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty to take one Indian run-of-river project to a World Bank-appointed neutral expert and another subsequently to the International Court of Arbitration. Whereas the neutral expert rejected Pakistan’s contentions, the arbitration proceedings are still on in the second case, the 330 MW Kishenganga plant.

Under this treaty, India has set aside 80 percent of the waters of the six-river Indus system for downstream Pakistan — the most generous water-sharing pact thus far in modern world history. India, however, is downriver to China, which rejects the very concept of water sharing.

Asia is the hub of the global water challenges. To contain the associated security risks, Asian states must build institutionalized water cooperation, based on transparency, information sharing, equitable distribution of benefits, dispute settlement, pollution control, and a mutual commitment to refrain from any project that could materially diminish transboundary flows.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of the recently published Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).

The growing water shortages carry economic risks that are as damaging as political corruption.

Brahma Chellaney, The Economic Times, March 2, 2012

Water is the most critical of all natural resources on which modern economies depend. Water scarcity and rapid economic advance cannot go hand-in-hand. Yet, with its per capita water availability falling to 1,582 cubic metres per year, India has become water-stressed.

In 1960, India signed a treaty indefinitely setting aside 80% of the Indus-system waters for downstream Pakistan — the most generous water-sharing pact thus far in modern world history. Its 1996 Ganges treaty with Bangladesh guarantees minimum cross-border flows in the dry season — a new principle in international water law. In fact, the treaty almost equally divides the downstream Ganges flows between the two countries. And now India is under pressure to reserve about half of the Teesta River waters for Bangladesh in what will be the world’s first water-sharing treaty of the 21st century. Existing water-sharing treaties elsewhere in the world, by contrast, do not come anywhere close to allocating half of all waters to the downstream state.

India, however, is downriver to China and, with about a dozen important rivers flowing in from the Tibetan Himalayan region, it gets almost one-third of all its yearly water supplies from Tibet, according to United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization figures. Although a number of nations stretching from Afghanistan to Vietnam receive waters from the Tibetan Plateau, India’s direct dependency on Tibetan waters is greater than any other country’s. But Beijing, far from wanting to emulate India’s Indus-style water munificence, rejects the very concept of water sharing and is building large dams on rivers flowing to other nations, with little regard for downriver interests. An extensive Chinese water infrastructure in Tibet will have a serious impact on India.

India thus faces difficult choices on water. It must manage its water resources wisely, including by building greater storage capacity, improving quality, and raising water efficiency and productivity levels.

Its ambitious, Vajpayee-era National River Linking Programme — which has remained on paper for the last 10 years — is designed to help connect 37 Himalayan and peninsular rivers in a pan-Indian water grid to reduce water shortages. Publicly ridiculed by Rahul Gandhi as a “disastrous idea,” it has now been ordered to be implemented by the Supreme Court in “a time-bound manner.” Will that really happen? The experience on the Supreme Court-overseen Narmada project doesn’t leave much room for optimism.

The Supreme Court indeed is burdened by multiple water disputes. With water increasingly at the centre of inter-provincial feuds, the Court has sought to keep peace between warring states. It has struggled for years to resolve water wrangles, only to find the parties returning to litigate again on new grounds.

Plans for large water projects usually run into stiff opposition from influential NGOs. Such is the power of these organizations to organize grassroots protests that it has now become virtually impossible to build a large dam, blighting the promise of hydropower. Proof of this was New Delhi’s 2010 decision to abandon three dam projects on River Bhagirathi, including one project midway, which resulted in the loss of several hundred million dollars of taxpayer money.

The largest dam India has built since independence is the 2,000 MW Tehri, which pales in comparison to the giant Chinese projects, such as the 18,300 MW Three Gorges Dam and the latest dam on the Mekong — the Xiaowan, taller than the Eiffel Tower. China’s proposed Metog (Motuo) Dam, to be built almost on the disputed border with India, is to produce 38,000 MW of power.

At a time when industrial and food production demands are putting increasing pressure on local water resources, NGOs have led grassroots protests also against the setting up of water-intensive industries, delaying the plans of giant corporations like ArcelorMittal and Posco, for example. Add to the picture India’s labyrinthine political and bureaucratic processes, which are slow-moving and bendable to public pressures, however contrived.

In this light, the National River Linking Programme looks like a plan of the dream world: A colossal water grid to handle 178 billion cubic meters of inter-basin water transfers a year through the construction of 12,500 kilometres of new canals, generating 34 GW of hydropower, creating 35 million hectares of additional irrigated land, and opening extended navigation networks. This is the kind of programme that only a large, ruthless autocracy like China can launch and implement.

To be sure, it was the Supreme Court that prodded the government in 2002 to embark on this water-grid programme. It is also true that partisan politics has been at play, with the UPA government loath to endorse its predecessor’s programme. It told Parliament in 2009 that the $120-billion programme — centred on the separate linking of the Himalayan and peninsular rivers — is cost-prohibitive.

Yet it has not tried to put forward a cost-effective alternative to a programme that the National Water Development Agency and the National Commission for Integrated Water Resource Development vouch is essential to stem droughts and floods and to double India’s annual grain production to more than 450 million tons to meet the demands of increasing prosperity and a growing population. Without expanding its irrigated land and adopting new plant varieties and farming techniques, India is likely to become a net food importer in the coming years — a development that will roil the already-tight international food markets.

With the water situation worsening, the Supreme Court has rightly decided to intercede. But given that India has struggled for decades to complete the Narmada project — less than 12½ times the hydropower capacity of China’s Three Gorges project — it is an open question whether the grand river-linking plans will be realized.

More fundamentally, the growing water shortages threaten to slow economic growth and fuel social tensions, unless the government fixes its disjointed policy approach and develops a long-term vision on managing water resources. Water must be treated as a key strategic issue.

(c) The Economic Times, 2012.