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6 Emerging Challenges to Transboundary Water Governance
Recent academic, policy and political assessments reveal that all regions of the
world face significant water security challenges both internally and in a transboundary context. The risk of serious political conflict is likely to arise or intensify in a
growing number of international river basins in the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent or South East Asia. These regions are not only at
high risk because of rapid changes in hydrology and the scale of human interventions,
but—even more prominently—because their transboundary governance regimes are
not sufficiently robust and flexible to absorb multiple and simultaneous changes.
Other regions of the world are not immune from these challenges either. Changing
hydroclimatic conditions are likely to force political decision-makers to revisit the
fundamentals of transboundary basin management even in such politically balanced
and well-watered regions as the joint watersheds between Canada and the United
States or the European Union.
6.2 The Anthropocene and the Global Water Crisis
6.2.1 The Concept of the Anthropocene
“Anthropocene” (the “Age of Man”) is a term widely used to describe the present
time interval in which many geologically significant conditions and processes are
fundamentally altered by human activities (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017). While not yet
formally recognised as a unit of the international Geological Time Scale, the term
usefully informs scientists and policy-makers about the overwhelming power and
scale of man’s impact on Earth generated by the sky-rocketing upsurge in industrial
and agricultural production in the past 150 years.
The most visible of such changes is the unprecedented increase in human population: since the 19th century the global population has risen from one billion to over
7 billion by 2015. Currently, 80 million new fellow human beings are born annually,
with the global population likely to reach 9 billion by 2050. The population boom
went hand-in-hand with a massive acceleration of urbanisation (6 billion people
are projected to be city-dwellers by 2050) that has produced a 25-fold increase in
megacities (urban areas with more than 10 million inhabitants) between 1950 and
2005 (Steffen et al. 2015).
Evidently, the Anthropocene has brought about a wide range of negative environmental consequences. These include an order-of-magnitude increase in the long-term
rate of soil erosion and sedimentation, unprecedented loss of biodiversity, growth in
atmospheric CO 2 concentration over a third above preindustrial level, etc. The ensuing rise in temperature has important repercussions on the state of the polar ice sheet,
glaciers and snow packs as well as sea levels and river flows. The rate of change
seems to exceed the adaptive capacities of the biosphere. Species will migrate (if
they can) to trace their optimal climatic conditions, resulting in cascade-like changes
in entire ecosystems both in land and sea. Coupled with other human stressors
6 Emerging Challenges to Transboundary Water Governance
Recent academic, policy and political assessments reveal that all regions of the
world face significant water security challenges both internally and in a transboundary context. The risk of serious political conflict is likely to arise or intensify in a
growing number of international river basins in the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent or South East Asia. These regions are not only at
high risk because of rapid changes in hydrology and the scale of human interventions,
but—even more prominently—because their transboundary governance regimes are
not sufficiently robust and flexible to absorb multiple and simultaneous changes.
Other regions of the world are not immune from these challenges either. Changing
hydroclimatic conditions are likely to force political decision-makers to revisit the
fundamentals of transboundary basin management even in such politically balanced
and well-watered regions as the joint watersheds between Canada and the United
States or the European Union.
6.2 The Anthropocene and the Global Water Crisis
6.2.1 The Concept of the Anthropocene
“Anthropocene” (the “Age of Man”) is a term widely used to describe the present
time interval in which many geologically significant conditions and processes are
fundamentally altered by human activities (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017). While not yet
formally recognised as a unit of the international Geological Time Scale, the term
usefully informs scientists and policy-makers about the overwhelming power and
scale of man’s impact on Earth generated by the sky-rocketing upsurge in industrial
and agricultural production in the past 150 years.
The most visible of such changes is the unprecedented increase in human population: since the 19th century the global population has risen from one billion to over
7 billion by 2015. Currently, 80 million new fellow human beings are born annually,
with the global population likely to reach 9 billion by 2050. The population boom
went hand-in-hand with a massive acceleration of urbanisation (6 billion people
are projected to be city-dwellers by 2050) that has produced a 25-fold increase in
megacities (urban areas with more than 10 million inhabitants) between 1950 and
2005 (Steffen et al. 2015).
Evidently, the Anthropocene has brought about a wide range of negative environmental consequences. These include an order-of-magnitude increase in the long-term
rate of soil erosion and sedimentation, unprecedented loss of biodiversity, growth in
atmospheric CO 2 concentration over a third above preindustrial level, etc. The ensuing rise in temperature has important repercussions on the state of the polar ice sheet,
glaciers and snow packs as well as sea levels and river flows. The rate of change
seems to exceed the adaptive capacities of the biosphere. Species will migrate (if
they can) to trace their optimal climatic conditions, resulting in cascade-like changes
in entire ecosystems both in land and sea. Coupled with other human stressors