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2 August 2021

The first water war is uncomfortably close

Roger Boyes

‘Whisky is for drinking,” Mark Twain supposedly said, “water’s for fighting.” That’s the way it’s looking in the Middle East and beyond at the moment. Disputes about how to allocate the water of the world’s great rivers — the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Mekong, to name just a few — have been raging for centuries but they have stopped short of all-out war. Climate change, the warming of the seas and extreme weather fluctuations may be bringing closer the first outright water war since the days of ancient Mesopotamia.

The water war of the 21st century could come in two forms. The first would be in a mismanaged or panicked response to rising seas. Around 150 million people live one metre or less above current

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