Middle East water conflicts and directions for conflict resolution:

In looking toward 2020, one of the most severe problems to be faced is an impending shortage of adequate supplies of fresh water essential for drinking and for growing crops. The Middle East, where a few waterways serve large areas of land belonging to a number of nations, is the place where strife over water is most likely to erupt. This paper examines the past how water in the Middle East came to be divided as it is today and looks at possible solutions for alleviating a water crisis and the resulting political tensions.Water resources development Middle East., Water-supply Middle East Management.,

Conflict and Cooperation Over Transboundary Waters

human development, water, sanitation

The Role of Creative Language in Addressing Political Asymmetries: The Israeli-Arab Water Agreements

International water agreements are often used as mechanisms for fostering and institutionalizing political cooperation. Yet, since water resources in many places are being driven to the edge of their natural limits, a number of international organizations have formulated legal principles and norms aimed at helping states resolve water disputes. While states have been urged to adopt these principles, it seems that they often embrace other less-traditional alternatives that may better address their own political needs. The aim of this study is to examine why states fail or decline to adopt several of the general principles of customary law formulated by these international organizations and to investigate how creative language is often adapted instead. The principles examined include basin-wide development and management; the appropriation of water according to clearly defined water rights; and joint management of shared water resources. The study focuses on three contemporary case studies centering on Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Territories. It concludes that the negotiation over the legal terminology of agreements between these parties exemplifies the power struggle and asymmetries between Israel and its neighbors. Much of the deadlock in the negotiations was resolved when the parties moved from their adversarial positions to address the underlying interests, in which a compromise was forged that captured elements of international law while still addressing the needs of the dominant riparian. These results indicate that under asymmetric settings, there is a need for creative legal discourse rather than an entrenchment of international water law, which has found to be a recipe for failure

Fire & Water: An Examination of the Technologies, Institutions, and Social Issues in Arms Control and Transboundary Water Resources Agreements

The world of environmental security is bringing the science of natural resources in ever-closer contact with the policy issues of international stability and foreign affairs. Many U.S. and international agencies-including the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the Southern African Development Community--­ now analyze foreign policy in part through the lens of environmental resources

Technologies, Institutions, and Social Issues in Arms Control and Transbounary Water-Resources Agreements

The world of environmental security is bringing the science of natural resources in ever-closer contact with the policy issues of international stability and foreign affairs. Many U.S. and international agencies—including the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the Southern African Development Community— now analyze foreign policy in part through the lens of environmental resources. In October 2001, three organizations—the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security; the Department of Geosciences of Oregon State University; and the Cooperative Monitoring Center (CMC) at Sandia National Laboratories—sponsored a workshop designed to highlight the closeness of national security and environmental concerns through explicitly comparing the technologies, institutions, and social issues in two seemingly disparate fields: arms control and transboundary water resources. With generous support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, “Fire & Water” workshop participants compared and contrasted these two fields and then identified questions for further analysis. Workshop sessions focused on three specific topics: (a) scientific and technological advances, (b) treaties and institutions, and (c) social and cultural issues

Promoting Development in Shared River Basins : Case Studies from International Experience

Transboundary freshwater systems create inevitable linkages and interdependencies between countries. The use of shared water resources by one country will, in most cases, impact other countries sharing the same system. At the same time, coordination among countries in the development of transboundary basins can yield greater benefits than would be available to individual countries pursuing individual development. UN Sustainable Development Goal 6 Target 5 recognizes this potential, calling on the world community to implement integrated water resources management at all levels, ‘including through transboundary cooperation as appropriate’. With a growing number of basins in which water use and demand permanently or temporarily exceeds the amount of renewable water available, and uncertainty from climate change, SDG Target 6.5 becomes increasingly relevant to development interventions designed to secure availability of supplies and create resilience. This is a companion document to the study "Promoting Development in Shared River Basins: Tools for Enhancing Transboundary Basin Management," which aims to contribute to relevant knowledge for achieving SDG Target 6.5. It presents six case studies from international experience on coordinated management in transboundary basins: Kura-Araks Basin; Columbia Basin; Chu and Talas Basins; Vuoksi Basin; Douro Basin; and Rhône Basin. The case studies demonstrate real-world application of selecting appropriate tools for individual transboundary situations along a three-stage process of coordinated basin development, which is detailed in the main study

Separating the influence of temperature, drought, and fire on interannual variability in atmospheric CO 2

The response of the carbon cycle in prognostic Earth system models (ESMs) contributes significant uncertainty to projections of global climate change. Quantifying contributions of known drivers of interannual variability in the growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) is important for improving the representation of terrestrial ecosystem processes in these ESMs. Several recent studies have identified the temperature dependence of tropical net ecosystem exchange (NEE) as a primary driver of this variability by analyzing a single, globally averaged time series of CO 2 anomalies. Here we examined how the temporal evolution of CO 2 in different latitude bands may be used to separate contributions from temperature stress, drought stress, and fire emissions to CO 2 variability. We developed atmospheric CO 2 patterns from each of these mechanisms during 1997–2011 using an atmospheric transport model. NEE responses to temperature, NEE responses to drought, and fire emissions all contributed significantly to CO 2 variability in each latitude band, suggesting that no single mechanism was the dominant driver. We found that the sum of drought and fire contributions to CO 2 variability exceeded direct NEE responses to temperature in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Additional sensitivity tests revealed that these contributions are masked by temporal and spatial smoothing of CO 2 observations. Accounting for fires, the sensitivity of tropical NEE to temperature stress decreased by 25% to 2.9 ± 0.4 Pg C yr −1  K −1 . These results underscore the need for accurate attribution of the drivers of CO 2 variability prior to using contemporary observations to constrain long‐term ESM responses. Key Points Accurate attribution of CO 2 variability is required to constrain coupled models Combined influence of drought and fire exceed ecosystem responses to temperature Temporal and spatial smoothing of CO 2 observations masks variability from firePeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109962/1/gbc20215.pd

Including gap region field‐aligned currents and magnetospheric currents in the MHD calculation of ground‐based magnetic field perturbations

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95073/1/jgra20311.pd