Press release -
Water wars: causes and possible solutions Study by the Politecnico di Milano in Nature Sustainability
Milan, 23 November 2022 - Will today's wars over oil be over water in the future? For years this question has been at the heart of a scientific debate on the causes of these wars and how they should be studied.
A study published in the prestigious Nature Sustainability by a group of researchers from the Politecnico di Milano has investigated the phenomenon, also in light of ‘new’ types of conflict in which paramilitary groups seem to capitalise on environmental stress.
In order to define the relationship between water and conflict, speaking only of water availability - or lack thereof - is not enough: in fact, conflicts tend to be associated with specific and complex socio-hydrological conditions, which in turn deal with the socio-economic value of water as a form of livelihood, especially in agriculture, and with the effects that human use of water has on the accessibility of this resource.
According to the authors, the research strategies that could contribute towards creating new types of scientific evidence on the interconnections between environment, society and conflict are: creating water availability measures that take into account the importance of water for human sustenance, focusing on mechanisms that arise when a resource is used unequally, and avoiding oversimplifications when considering environmental factors in social analyses.
The work is based on the fusion of hydrological modelling and statistical analysis, combined with a specific focus on socio-environmental, cultural and political mechanismswhich is used for studying the socio-hydrological characteristics of conflicts in the Lake Chad region in Central Africa.
This region has been affected by several conflicts in the last 20 years, such as the Boko Haram insurgency, the civil war in Darfur, and the coups in the Central African Republic. In addition to analysing data on the level of human development, urbanisation of the region and ethnic composition of the population, the researchers used a model to create water and soil availability indicators for agriculture and human sustenance in general.
These data were related to the conflicts in the region between 2000 and 2015 and a method was developed that, through a multidimensional approach, manages to explore more secondary, indirect and complex relationships within the water-conflict nexus.
On the one hand, conflicts tend to persist in the same places and expand to the closest areas. Most conflicts occur in highly ‘anomalous’ locations (in terms of water availability) compared to the rest of the region, and the type of anomaly tends to be correlated with the dynamics of the conflict.
‘Working in this way it’s possible to produce quantitative and qualitative descriptions of particular environmental “patterns” associated with specific conflict dynamics.’ - explains Nikolas Galli,a researcher in the Glob3ScienCE(Global Studies on Sustainable Security in a Changing Environment) group at the Politecnico di Milano, coordinated by Maria Cristina Rulli, who added: ‘Socio-environmental, socio-hydrological and hydro-social research is pushing academic boundaries towards integrating natural and social sciences in order to produce more accurate representations of socio-ecological systems. Our study provides a new methodological approach and new information for understanding natural resources conflicts in a case study with a long history of (un)scientific representations by both natural and social scientists and policy makers’.
The study Socio-hydrological features of armed conflicts in the Lake Chad Basin is authored by Nikolas Galli, Ilenia Epifani, Davide Danilo Chiarelli and Maria Cristina Rulli of the Politecnico di Milano and Jampel Dell'Angelo of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.
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Politecnico di Milano is a scientific-technological university which trains engineers, architects and industrial designers.
The University has always focused on the quality and innovation of its teaching and research, developing a fruitful relationship with business and productive world by means of experimental research and technological transfer.
Research has always been linked to didactics and it is a priority commitment which has allowed Politecnico Milano to achieve high quality results at an international level as to join the university to the business world. Research constitutes a parallel path to that formed by cooperation and alliances with the industrial system.
Knowing the world in which you are going to work is a vital requirement for training students. By referring back to the needs of the industrial world and public administration, research is facilitated in following new paths and dealing with the need for constant and rapid innovation. The alliance with the industrial world, in many cases favored by Fondazione Politecnico and by consortiums to which Politecnico belong, allows the university to follow the vocation of the territories in which it operates and to be a stimulus for their development.
The challenge which is being met today projects this tradition which is strongly rooted in the territory beyond the borders of the country, in a relationship which is developing first of all at the European level with the objective of contributing to the creation of a single professional training market. Politecnico takes part in several research, sites and training projects collaborating with the most qualified European universities. Politecnico's contribution is increasingly being extended to other countries: from North America to Southeast Asia to Eastern Europe. Today the drive to internationalization sees Politecnico Milano taking part into the European and world network of leading technical universities and it offers several courses beside many which are entirely taught in English.
