Water Security: The Mediterranean’s New Geopolitical Challenge

The reflection on the geoeconomic and geopolitical value of water has been gaining steadily increasing importance in recent years.

In many respects, we are witnessing the same historical trajectory that led energy, particularly after the 1973 oil crisis, to evolve from being regarded simply as a commodity, an input to production, into an essential component of national security.

The strategic relevance of water is, if anything, even greater, considering that water resources are not only essential for food production, industry and ecosystem health, but also underpin energy production itself. According to the UN World Water Development Report, approximately 90% of global energy production relies on processes that use water.

This growing awareness has developed through several important milestones in the international debate. In 1977, in Mar del Plata, water was addressed for the first time through a dedicated United Nations global conference. In 2015, the protection of and access to water resources were enshrined in the international sustainable development agenda through two specific goals, Goal 6 on freshwater and Goal 14 on oceans and seas. In 2023, the United Nations resumed convening a global conference on water after a hiatus of nearly half a century.

From a geoeconomic perspective, as early as 2016 the World Bank published its report High and Dry: Climate Change, Water and the Economy, warning that water scarcity, exacerbated by climate change, could cause GDP losses of up to 6% by 2050 in some regions, while also fuelling migration and increasing the risk of conflict.

Water is thus ceasing to be regarded solely as an environmental issue, while the broader concept of “water security” is beginning to emerge, articulated across at least three dimensions.

The first concerns water as a transport infrastructure in its own right. Much like railway networks or motorways, the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal and the Straits of Hormuz, Gibraltar and the Bosporus are among the major chokepoints of global trade. These essential waterways highlight the strategic importance of maritime security and commercial routes, bringing the concept of the “maritime domain” back to the forefront.

Inland waters are also used as transport routes in many regions of the world. At the end of July, Germany’s river monitoring system reported extremely low water levels at 44% of monitoring stations on the Rhine and 78% of those on the Danube, two of Europe’s largest and most important rivers. This had consequences for transport costs and delivery times as navigability was disrupted or, in some stretches, became impossible. Drought, climate change and declining river flows are therefore becoming major sources of economic insecurity and extreme vulnerability for States, directly affecting the viability of their commercial transport routes.

A second dimension concerns the issue of “shared water”. According to the 2024 UNECE-UNESCO/UN-Water report, there are 313 transboundary river and lake basins and 468 transboundary aquifers worldwide. Yet only 43 out of 153 countries have operational arrangements covering at least 90% of their transboundary waters, while just 26 countries have operational arrangements covering all of their shared waters.

This has now become a crucial geopolitical issue, together with the regulation of watercourse use between upstream countries, which effectively “possess and manage” the water before it reaches others, and downstream countries, which are heavily exposed to the decisions taken upstream. In the wider Mediterranean region, this “natural geopolitical asymmetry” affects river basins of primary strategic importance, including the Nile, Jordan, Tigris-Euphrates, Orontes, Drin and Sava basins.

Finally, the third dimension concerns the availability of and access to water resources, the aspect most directly linked to the security of citizens and the protection of their living conditions. Today, new balances must be found in “territorial water budgets”, which are being placed under growing strain by demographic pressure, increasing industrial water use and a worrying “asynchrony” between groundwater recharge periods, increasingly erratic rainfall patterns and peak periods of domestic, agricultural and industrial water demand.

The critical system of integrated water management requires sustained care and investment in order to guarantee access, distribution and water quality, through constant maintenance of strategic water-storage infrastructure and increased capacity for wastewater treatment and reuse.

More than 500 million people depend on the Mediterranean region’s major water infrastructures. Over 60% of the available water resources on the southern and eastern shores are managed through large-scale artificial infrastructure: the Aswan High Dam, Libya’s Great Man-Made River water-transfer system, Israel’s major desalination plants, the Anatolian dams of Türkiye’s GAP project, as well as the aqueduct systems supplying cities such as Rome, Algiers, Tunis, Amman and Cairo.

Aqueducts, dams, desalination plants, pumping systems, distribution networks and wastewater treatment facilities now constitute the invisible backbone sustaining the economic and social life of hundreds of millions of people. When a power plant is struck, energy supply is interrupted. When water infrastructure is struck, the very survival of communities is placed at risk.

The consequences of damage can range from the interruption of drinking-water supplies to an increased risk of epidemics and waterborne diseases; from reduced water availability for agriculture, resulting in greater food insecurity, to the forced displacement of populations and the consequent worsening of social and political tensions.

Although explicitly protected under international conventions, including the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, notably Article 54 of Additional Protocol I, recent events in Gaza, in the Gulf, in Qeshm, Kuwait and Bemani have repeatedly shown how water infrastructure can unlawfully become a military target. As the critical importance of such infrastructure has become increasingly evident, water systems have also become targets of terrorist cyberattacks, as illustrated by the seven attacks reportedly suffered by US water infrastructure at the beginning of the summer and reported by The Guardian.

Despite the increasingly recognised centrality of water, international water governance remains weak and fragmented, while water often lacks a distinct identity and dedicated space within major international environmental summits, including the COPs.

Yet, as we have seen, water security increasingly coincides with human security. Starting with the Mediterranean, there is therefore a need to promote shared maps of critical water infrastructure, dedicated civil-protection and military-protection protocols, satellite monitoring systems for strategic infrastructure, regional cooperation mechanisms for emergency response, and international recognition of the Mediterranean’s major water infrastructures as essential assets for regional stability.

In terms of the paradigm shift required at international level, a particularly thought-provoking proposal has been put forward by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water (GCEW). In its 2024 report The Economics of Water: Valuing the Hydrological Cycle as a Global Common Good, the Commission argues that blue water and green water, precipitation, soils, vegetation and atmospheric moisture flows should be understood as components of a single interdependent system and recognised as a “global common good”.

Without taking the concept to extremes or constructing categories that may be intellectually appealing but difficult to operationalise, and while fully respecting national sovereignty and local levels of water-resource management, consideration could be given to defining the stability and integrity of the global hydrological cycle as a “common good of humankind”, entailing a shared responsibility for its protection, while fully respecting the sovereignty of States over their own natural resources.

Such a legal framework would not internationalise water itself, but rather the responsibility for maintaining the stability of its cycle. This responsibility could be linked to a limited set of verifiable obligations: monitoring atmospheric moisture flows and green water; protecting ecosystems that are critical to the hydrological cycle; assessing the transboundary hydrological impacts of major land-use transformations; financing ecosystem services; and establishing an international reporting mechanism.

Emilio Ciarlo