WATER POLITICS

That the fields around al-Jafr in southern Jordan are often desiccated is a source of frustration and deprivation for locals. That they can sometimes hear the gurgle of water in pipelines passing along the periphery of their lands is cause for outright fury.

Since 2013, when the Jordanian government inaugurated the Disi Water Conveyance Project to pipe groundwater from the country’s rural far south to its populous northern cities, communities such as al-Jafr have been up in arms over what they see as the pilfering of their resources. The more compromised that their own wells have become—many only reaching water at more than half a mile down—the more that anger has grown.

The area has seen frequent, sometimes fiery demonstrations. On at least 300 occasions, the pipeline has been attacked or in some way sabotaged, according to project security personnel, who have had to recalibrate from terror threats to irate locals. As one gendarme put it to me back in 2019, “they think Amman is stealing their water, and they’re not happy about it. We fear many more problems in the future.”

Al-Jafr’s grievances and plight are representative of a growing global trend. Urban water demand is surging, while the supplies that many cities have historically drawn upon are very much not. Fearful of metropolises running dry but unwilling or unable to address the root causes of their troubles, many authorities have hit upon a similar strategy: annex more water from the countryside, the consequences for peace and stability be damned.

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Cities have a long history of appropriating rural water, but the rate of capture appears to have picked up significantly this century. In just the past five years, more than a dozen countries, including Senegal and India, have announced or assembled long distance pipelines to provide for their thirsty megacities. China is nearing completion of its massive South-North Water Transfer Project, which will bring at least half a Nile’s worth of water annually from the Yangtze River and others to Beijing, Tianjin, and other northern urban areas. Iran has built infrastructure to transport water from agriculturally rich provinces to parched, largely urban ones.

Across the world, at least 400 million people in roughly 70 urban areas annually consume tens of billions of cubic meters of water that is cumulatively transported from tens of thousands of kilometers away. This water grab is partly a function of soaring urbanization. Cities have added around 1.8 billion residents since 2000, and they’re projected to add 2.5 billion more by 2050. With those increases naturally comes greater thirst, much of it centered in some of the world’s hottest, driest, and most haphazardly planned places, especially in South Asia.

It’s also partly the result of snowballing climate and environmental stresses. Many of the ground and surface water resources on which cities have historically depended have either been depleted by severe overpumping, emptied by increasingly erratic rainfall, or both. Vital reservoirs from Bogotá to Istanbul are now routinely running dry, fueling a desperate hunt for more dependable water sources.

Given these immense demands, much of this redistributive infrastructure may seem unavoidable. But the growing violence that it’s leaving in its wake is not. It’s the result of shoddy governance.

Many of these schemes tap water from agrarian areas that are also reeling from drought and don’t feel that they have the water to spare. Consequently, projects designed to pipe away scarce yet critical resources go down like lead balloons, including in places that, in times of more consistent weather patterns, were relatively unbothered by urban transfers.

In Nepal, for instance, where the government recently completed a decades-long project to channel water from the Himalayas to Kathmandu, mountain communities are livid over what they see as state-sanctioned water theft. Under the terms of an agreement struck to assuage local opposition in the run-up to the project’s 2021 opening, officials pledged to leave sufficient water for farmers, according to both villagers and the mayor of Melamchi Bazar, a Himalayan valley town.

Thanks to Kathmandu’s insatiable needs, however, that’s not what’s happened. The redirected rivers have become feeble versions of their once bountiful selves, with much of their flow now fed through tunnels to thirsty millions in the city.