Water Conflicts Are Surging—and the International Community Must Act

Water has always been a tool for war, but in recent years, the world has entered into a dark, dark era of hydrographic terrorism. Throughout the world, from Yemen to Ukraine, this critical resource is increasingly used as a tool for control. According to the Pacific Institute, global water violence increased by more than 50 percent in 2023 alone. However, international institutions are still treating water as an environmental development or issue – not as a flash point of national security.

Fair-Weather, such as the United Nations Water Agreement, and the integrated resources management approach to integrated resources, will not survive from the upcoming storms, and with climate shock intensification, ignoring this threat is not less than neglect. The water stress that the climate is generated by despair, especially in the places where corrupt or absent governments create a vacuum. Extremist groups fall into this void, providing a distorted feeling of regime.

Water has always been a tool for war, but in recent years, the world has entered into a dark, dark era of hydrographic terrorism. Throughout the world, from Yemen to Ukraine, this critical resource is increasingly used as a tool for control. According to the Pacific Institute, global water violence increased by more than 50 percent in 2023 alone. However, international institutions are still treating water as an environmental development or issue – not as a flash point of national security.

Fair-Weather, such as the United Nations Water Agreement, and the integrated resources management approach to integrated resources, will not survive from the upcoming storms, and with climate shock intensification, ignoring this threat is not less than neglect. The water stress that the climate is generated by despair, especially in the places where corrupt or absent governments create a vacuum. Extremist groups fall into this void, providing a distorted feeling of regime.

This problem is especially clear in the coast, where violent extremist groups with relations with the Islamic State and the scarcity of water in Al Qaeda are used for power. In the areas abandoned by governments suffering from lack of funding, these groups provide water and resources to desperate societies, and employment through a worrying integration of faith and survival.

In the homeland of the Gambia, which is located on the coast, the high salinity of climate change is an internal creeping. As a result, nearly a third of the country’s rice fields in the country can become unusable during a decade. In the neighboring Senegal, the demand for water is expected to rise by up to 60 percent by 2035, while the rains in general decreased.

Tensions are already rising quickly. More than 2.6 million Gambia lacks safe drinking water. Seasonal water deficiency leads internal migration and cities pressure like Bangol. Over the past five years, there have been 450 games between farmers and sponsors in the middle of the coast on dwindling water sources and grazing lands. Gambia’s strong tradition helped in religious tolerance resist the attractiveness of extremism so far. But the high unemployment of youth and climate stress increases the risk of extremism.

Through the coast, this has become the base. Recent studies have found that water conflicts in Africa have increased over the past twenty years and that water scarcity is related to the violent conflict in the coast. Meanwhile, extremists expand to Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, where the state’s authority collapses. Gambia is located in the west of these countries, and without urgent regional cooperation, it can be next to the victim of the rebellion on a large scale.

In the past, regional governments have tried to work together to stop this problem. During the 1970s and eighties of the last century, the severe drought conditions helped push the formation of the Seengambia Federation, a bold but short-term political union to enhance the integration between Gambia and Senegal, including the joint management of rivers and agriculture. The Union eventually collapsed in 1989 due to political lack of confidence and the failure of the two countries to integrate armies and economies. However, he realized what political makers should remember today: water does not know any limits.

Here lies the problem. Despite nearly two -thirds of the global fresh water flowing across the national borders, the world still lacks a modern global framework for its rule. Most of the water participation agreements today are dual, outdated, easy to abandon when relationships are disturbed. Take the Nile Water Agreement in 1959 between Egypt and Sudan, which fueled contracts of regional friction because it excluded the upstream countries like Ethiopia.

This is why the world needs cross -border international water agreements. Organizations such as the African Union, the economic community in West African countries, and the United Nations should take the implementable and craftsmanship treaties that include items to cancel the escalation, binding arbitration, and exchange data in the actual time to ensure cooperation on the basis even during the conflict. Moreover, treaties should also impose the use of technologies such as satellite monitoring, artificial intelligence prediction of prediction and water shortage management through early warning systems, allowing preventive measures before despair despair to violence.

But no international solution will succeed until policy makers treat the radical causes of hydrographic education: climate -based water shortage, state failure, and public confidence erosion. To meet this, civil society organizations and the international community must join efforts to provide public services and build society’s flexibility from within. This means looking at beyond the traditional political and diplomatic strategies to push the permanent change from the thousand to Z.

Throughout West Africa, civil society groups are already setting the basis for filling climate work. Organizations such as faith in our planet (FFOP) guarantee that religion can be a tool for climate action. He was founded by Muhammad bin Abdul -Abd al -Karim, head of the Islamic World League, who trains religious leaders in climate science with spiritual teachings.

For example, the fellowship of religious leaders of the youth in FFOP, which it attended in 2023, enables the next generation to face issues such as water scarcity in ways that take into account cultural contexts. In 2024, the Islamic World League helped put these teachings into effect. Quoting the Islamic belief that all people should search without discrimination, it launched an ambitious project to ensure access to clean water in Malawi.

Other popular initiatives have made meaningful invasions to resolve the conflict. In Nigeria, for example, organizations such as searching for local intermediaries of the common train to resolve water -related conflicts in areas affected by Boko Haram. In Mali, community dialogues have succeeded in changing tensions about access to irrigation in drought areas.

The impact of these initiatives often exceeds international tasks, to a large extent because they are deeply included in local communities. History shows that pressure on the base level works. For example, thanks to the call from civil society groups such as the Stop Ecocide International, that the International Criminal Court is about to recognize the fifth electronic crime – a boom that depends on recent gains in climate justice, as citizens across Europe began to hold their governments accountable for environmental failure.

This leads me to my last point. The international community must take the decisive step of clearly recognizing water weapons as a crime under international law. The manipulation of this resource should carry the harm to civilians or additional countries, real consequences, including penalties, prosecutions and reform.

Throughout the world, 1.8 billion people live in absolute water scarcity areas, which means that they have access to less than 500 cubic meters of water annually. Many of these individuals are one crisis away from falling into the grip of extremism. The cavity may take decades, and the common efforts of countless organizations and governments.

But if the international community has developed a modern framework for cross-border water-with the legal standards that can be implemented, the climate infrastructure, and the inclusion of society in its essence, it can change the tide. Only then people can restore water as a source of critical life, not the weapon of war.