Water Wars ...

Global distribution of the current likelihood of hydro-political issues among the main transboundary basins (transboundary basin borders in black, non-transboundary areas.

Water wars, similar in terms of inevitability with nations desiring ever more powerful weapons, become a given due to just how intense the impact of climate change will be on planet earth as man moves further into the 21st century.

Competition over limited water resources is one of the main concerns for the coming decades. Although water issues alone have not been the sole trigger for warfare in the past, tensions over freshwater management and use represent one of the main concerns in political relations between riparian states and may exacerbate existing tensions, increase regional instability and social unrest. Previous studies made great efforts to understand how international water management problems were addressed by actors in a more cooperative or confrontational way. In this study, we analyze what are the pre-conditions favoring the insurgence of water management issues in shared water bodies, rather than focusing on the way water issues are then managed among actors. 

Factor in the issue of too many people and the scenario for chaos becomes even direr.

Changes in population density are expected to exacerbate the anthropogenic pressure on water resources, the availability of which is strongly impacted by changes in climate. The combination of these two factors is estimated to impact negatively on the overall hydro-political risk. The likelihood of water related issues is expected to increase globally, with gridded values averaging between +36.4% in the case of moderate climate change (RCP 4.5) and +37.1% in the case of the more pessimistic climate scenario (RCP 8.5) for the year 2050, and respectively between +39.3 and +46.8% for the year 2100. 

Don't say we haven't been warned.