“Whiskey’s for drinking, and water is for fighting,” or is it? This quote, attributed to Mark Twain, is largely being proven inaccurate. After researching the broader and conclusive portion of my project, I found an extraordinary amount of evidence which points to transboundary watershed cooperation. By investigating directly within national water ministry’s databases for information, current treaties and their exact purposes were more easily discovered. However, while major bilateral and multilateral initiatives have been enacted in multiple major watershed’s management systems, many of which take climate variability concerns into account, few have utilized enough specificity for such treaties to be effective in the long term. For example, while some nations have agreed to specific adaptive allocations, determined by annual water levels, many have only promised general cooperation with no substantive enforcement procedures. If inefficient allocation persists, in combination with growing climate issues, especially in regards to drought, such facades of adaptive collaboration will crumble for transboundary watershed management systems.
Investigations by Lydia Bleifuss