Water scarcity, warfare, and the paradox of value

a post by Scott M Moore for the OUP blog


Subnational Hydropolitics‘. Owned by Oxford University Press.

Back in 1995, then World Bank Vice President Ismail Serageldin made an important prediction about the future: “The wars of the next century will be fought over water,” Serageldin warned, “unless we change our approach to managing this precious and vital resource.” Fortunately for the world, Serageldin’s predication has so far not occurred. No wars have been fought strictly over water in modern history. In fact globally the number of international agreements over water far exceeds the number of international conflicts. That paradox shows that water can be just as powerful a driver of cooperation as of conflict between nations, regions, and communities.

But that doesn’t mean Serageldin is wrong. The world does have a big problem with its most critical resource, and it’s very far from managing water effectively. Broadly speaking, the world faces three major challenges when it comes to freshwater. First, water is unevenly distributed across both space and time, meaning it’s almost never available where and when we want it, and in the right quantity. This problem is just as bad when there’s too much water, causing flooding, as when there’s too little. Moreover, this mismatch is getting worse because of climate change, which in many parts of the world is increasing the frequency of floods and droughts while also making precipitation more variable, and therefore harder to predict.

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Do People Favour Policies that Protect Future Generations? Evidence from a British Survey of Adults

an article by Hilary Graham, J. Martin Bland, Richard Cookson, Mona Kanaan and Piran C. L. White (University of York, UK) published in Journal of Social Policy Volume 46, Issue 3 July 2017

Abstract

Long-range temporal choices are built into contemporary policy-making, with policy decisions having consequences that play out across generations. Decisions are made on behalf of the public who are assumed to give much greater weight to their welfare than to the welfare of future generations. The paper investigates this assumption.

It briefly discusses evidence from sociological and economic studies before reporting the findings of a British survey of people's intergenerational time preferences based on a representative sample of nearly 10,000 respondents.

Questions focused on two sets of policies:

1. health policies to save lives and
2. environmental policies to protect against floods that would severely damage homes, businesses and other infrastructure.

For both sets of policies, participants were offered a choice of three policy options, each bringing greater or lesser benefits to their, their children’s and their grandchildren’s generations.

For both saving lives and protecting against floods, only a minority selected the policy that most benefited their generation; the majority selected policies bringing equal or greater benefits to future generations.

Our study raises questions about a core assumption of standard economic evaluation, pointing instead to concern for future generations as a value that many people hold in common.

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