This year’s World Water Day is taking on a broader theme than years past: sustainable development. The theme makes sense as two major international processes – the drafting of the Sustainable Development Goals to replace the Millennium Development Goals, and the most anticipated UN Climate Summit in years – are taking place in 2015. Decisions made over the next nine months will play a huge role in relationships between nations and global development priorities going forward.

It also gives us a chance to reflect on how transdisciplinary water issues are. Just as the subthemes of this year suggest, water is a critical component of urbanization, energy, industry, food, equality, the environment, health, security – essentially everything.

Over the last year, New Security Beat has published a ton of posts highlighting water’s role in these critical and myriad fields, from India’s “choke point” struggles and China’s growing middle class to “water wars” in the Middle East and how population dynamics affect scarcity in Nepal.

Peacebuilding, Fragility, Security

Water Wars? Think Again: Conflict Over Freshwater Structural Rather Than Strategic, Cameron Harrington. “It has been claimed for decades that a confluence of factors, including water scarcity, societal unrest, and strategic maneuvering, will inevitably push states and other actors to act aggressively, perhaps even violently, to secure precious water resources.”

USAID Launches New Water, Conflict, and Peacebuilding Toolkit, Moses Jackson. “In almost all of the countries where we work on water, we have to address conflict issues.”

Can We Forecast Where Water Conflicts Are Likely to Occur?, Thomas Bernauer and Tobias Böhmelt. “Building on new data on international river basins and conflict events, we revisited earlier research on the basins at risk of conflict and developed a prediction and forecasting approach for international river basin conflicts.”

Opportunity Costs: Evidence Suggests Variability, Not Scarcity, Primary Driver of Water Conflict, Cullen Hendrix. “Variability complicates the creation of contracts governing shared use, making conflict more likely.”

What Can Iraq’s Fight Over the Mosul Dam Tell Us About Water Security?, Cameron Harrington and Schuyler Null. “One might see the capture of the Mosul Dam as the moment IS ascended from a dangerous insurgent group to an existential threat to Iraq as a state.”

Report: Damming of Lake Turkana Could Leave Thousands Without Water, Provoke Tribal Conflict, Linnea Bennett. “If it was just a dam we would have said, ‘OK, maybe there will still be some percentage coming into the lake.’ But with the addition of the plantations, this is disastrous.”

Hydro-Diplomacy Can Build Peace Over Shared Waters, But Needs More Support, Benjamin Pohl and Susanne Schmeier. “Policymakers can reap peace dividends by investing in intrabasin cooperation, which can help resolve existing conflicts, prevent future conflicts, and create goodwill that spills-over beyond water.”

Nepal’s Micro-Hydropower Projects Have Surprising Effect on Peace Process, Florian Krampe. “Climate change touches on nearly every sector of society and we should be prepared for mitigation efforts to do the same.”

Gidon Bromberg: Jordan River Shows Water Can Be a Path to Peace, Generate Will for Change, Paris Achenbach. “Water is an opportunity in areas where there aren’t many opportunities.”

Gender Equity

Somali Refugees Show How Conflict, Gender, Environmental Scarcity Become Entwined, Luisa Veronis. “All of them held a remarkably deep knowledge of environmental conditions in Somalia and could describe at length how drought, deforestation, desertification, and extreme heat created scarcity of essential household resources.”

UN Report Highlights Women’s Roles in Natural Resource Management During and After Conflict, Priya Kamdar. “Population pressures around refugee and displaced persons camps can lead to water shortages and deforestation, forcing women to go further and further away to collect drinking water and firewood.”

Health and Development

From Victoria to Chilwa: Integrated Development in Two African Lake Basins, Moses Jackson. “Well-intentioned technologies such as irrigation [were] unknowingly increasing bilharzia prevalence.”

The Case for Better Aid to Pakistan: Climate, Health, Demographic Challenges Demand New Approach, Kate Diamond. “It’s an irony of climate change that a country with barely enough water for drinking and irrigation suffers from such inundations.”

Measurement Matters: Understanding Water Scarcity in an Increasingly Complex World, Kathleen Mogelgaard. “In this part of the world, adapting to climate change is figuring out how to manage water.”

In Nepal, Integrating Forest and Family Health Is Improving Lives, Sean Peoples. “The Chepang of Jogimara feel less pressure to leave. Other parts of Nepal that have developed community forestry user groups have also seen deforestation decline and soil and water quality improve.”

Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Programs as a Strategy to Advance Maternal Health, Katrina Braxton. “Only 44 percent of health facilities that delivered women were water and sanitation safe and the number was even lower when considering the actual delivery room – 24 percent.”

Can Ecologists and Engineers Work Together to Harvest Water for the Future?, Lisa Palmer. “Rather than build overly conservative monolithic solutions, we now design systems that can be tweaked.”

From the China Environment Forum

Water and New Development Path Are Priorities in U.S.-China Climate Agreement, Keith Schneider. “The changes the agreement calls for in water conservation, efficiency, clean energy, green equipment, and the like are the bricks to a new foundation for people to survive and thrive in a perilous ecological age.”

Can China Solve Its Water-Energy Choke Point?, Susan Chan Shifflett. “How China manages the water-energy nexus will have ripple effects across the global economy and environment.”

Surf and Turf: The Environmental Impacts of China’s Growing Appetite for Pork and Seafood, Susan Chan Shifflett. “In 2010, China’s first National Pollution Census found agriculture was a bigger cause of water pollution than industry.”

Mapping China’s Dam Rush – and the Environmental Consequences, Luan “Jonathan” Dong. “Chinese dam developers have often failed to respond to concerns over their impacts in other Southeast Asian countries, limiting or sometimes outright refusing to share data.”

India

Broken Landscape: Confronting India’s Water-Energy Chokepoint, Sean Peoples. “Descending down the branch steps that circumnavigate a 20 or 30 meter-wide shaft, the cold, damp air is full of the sound of falling water and axes plunking away on rock.”

Faltering Energy Production, Damaged Water Resources Demand Modi’s Close Attention, Keith Schneider. “A cycle of risk involving water, energy, and food that is harming India’s environment, slowing its economy, and impeding its development.”

India’s Growing Water Risks, Illustrated, Tien Shiao, Andrew Maddocks, Christopher Carson, and Emma Loizeaux. “More than half of India faces high to extremely high water stress, affecting nearly 600 million people.”

New Portal for Himalayan Region Aims to Provide Better Environmental Data, Pat Chadwick. “Glaciers that sit atop the watersheds provide irrigation, power, and drinking water for over 1.3 billion people.”

Urbanization

Alexandros Washburn on How Smart City Technologies Can Help Coastal Cities Prepare for Climate Change, Schuyler Null. “As Hurricane Sandy bore down on New York in October 2012, the city’s chief urban designer was at home in Brooklyn deciding whether or not to evacuate.”

Are We Keeping up With Asia’s Urbanization?, Steven Gale. “Scenario planning and the analysis of real-time data from remote sensors and cell phones is uncovering novel patterns that can help cities deal with traffic congestion, access clean water, prepare for natural disasters, and remedy intermittent electricity shortfalls.”

Eric Chu on Translating Climate Adaptation Theory to Action on the Local Level, Sarah Meyerhoff. “A women’s water management group in Indore was better able to organize and plan their work after they understood climate change was driving much of the long-term water stress they experienced.”