When considering the potential effects of “backdraft” on climate change responses, the question of the world’s water future may be the most salient of all—especially as we examine water supplies and freshwater ecosystem health.

Large changes are coming to how we store, use, and price water, as well as in how we mitigate environmental harm and adapt to water-related stresses such as drought and flooding. What will those changes look like over the next thirty or forty years?

First, there will be efforts to manage supply more effectively. The ability to harvest and store large quantities of water will be increasingly valuable, as a way to smooth out climate-driven uncertainties. And more water will be recycled, closing the loop on wasteful ‘once through’ systems of water use.

Those efforts will be important because access to predictable water supplies will become an important part of global economic competitiveness. Efforts to tap new sources will intensify. And managing extremes, particularly around flooding, will become a central principle of planning, in urban settings and for coastal land management.

There is much that is positive in these trends. Water use is growing more efficient and more intentional. It is hard to justify systems that expend vast quantities of energy to purify water and pump it to end users, only to expend several liters to carry away a small quantity of human waste and then either discharge the treated wastewater or fail to treat it entirely.

Yet things don’t happen simply because we need them to; witness our sluggish response to the imperative of climate mitigation and adaptation. Still, the incentive to make these adjustments is too strong to ignore. Indeed, each of these shifts is already well underway.

If done properly, sensible adjustments around storing water, pricing water, recycling water, and designing landscapes for flood risk could make communities more climate- and water-resilient. They could also help to forestall the numerous conflict risks around water—the dangers of which, though sometimes simplified and overstated, are real enough.

Managing Transitions

The realization that the way nations must manage changes in water supply and usage—as well as protect environments from water-driven climate effects—is already upon us.

In the Netherlands, floating office space is being deployed, ready to be moved in the face of flood risk. In Israel, economically competitive desalination plants line the Mediterranean coast. In China, vast engineering works are underway to move water from the more abundant south to the parched north. The Colorado River basin has finally admitted that it allocates more water rights than there is water available, triggering cutbacks for downstream farmers and, looming ahead, for cities.

Yet, given the sheer size of the adjustments ahead and their high stakes for human health, livelihoods, and environmental integrity, there is also great potential for conflict in how these adaptations are carried out.

First, the vast sums of money involved in these transformations, as well as their dramatic implications for land use, livelihoods, and human settlements, create enormous distributive consequences.

Consider the need to enhance water storage. Doing so is an essential tool to smooth out the inconsistencies of climate-driven water extremes of flooding and drought. Yet, as the history of large dams has taught us all too well, storing water upstream can trigger a devastating human and environmental toll downstream—displacing people, changing the physical and chemical properties of the water, devastating ecosystem-based livelihoods such as fishing, and increasing disease risks.

Also, if storing water in large quantities locks in the ability of, say, increasingly thirsty cities or globally mobile industries to outbid rural areas for the water, it could do more to reinforce existing water inequalities than to create the resilience for which the storage was allegedly designed.

The same is true of water recycling. As noted above, our once-through, open-ended systems of water use make little sense; provided it is done properly, the economic logic of water recycling is unimpeachable. Yet, it is often the case that someone downstream was replying on that water for their own uses (even when doing so means relying on water of degraded quality). Without attention to the wider patterns of access, the decision to recycle large amounts of water is also a choice to redistribute it, often to the detriment of the poorest and most marginalized users.

As with the uses and reuses of water, so with the threats of harm it brings. Planning for flood resilience is urgently needed in the context of climate change. But distributional controversies abound in how we do so. Coastal flood barriers may protect one community while simultaneously exiling another from the coast.

Flood-sensitive planning attentive to protecting and expanding green spaces is a powerful tool for resilience. But ‘making room for the river’ can mean less room, or even forced displacement, for existing communities, again with the already vulnerable most likely to feel the pressures.

Disputes and Dealmaking

One key to addressing these challenges is to build out more effective mechanisms for dispute resolution. The high stakes make water ripe for social conflict, but conflict management remains the weak link in water governance. Even where arrangements have been formalized, they may be designed to resolve the problems of an earlier era.

Most existing international river-basin commissions, for example, were created in a historical period when allocation of water supplies and (perhaps) pollution control were the primary considerations. These bodies function on principles  closer to contractual arrangements, with largely fixed terms and conditions, than  joint schemes for active management. They may create predictability, but they often lack the flexibility to adjust to changing circumstances.

Another challenge is the ability to engage with the full array of stakeholders. Many of the world’s largest cities lie in international river basins, and many are beginning to experience the urban-versus-rural water tensions alluded to above. Treaty-based arrangements typically lack the capacity to engage those subnational and transnational actors in their deliberations.

For instance, when the US agreed with Canada to create the International Joint Commission and with Mexico on the International Boundary and Water Commission, these were seen as innovative, forward-looking mechanisms. Today, both agreements struggle to address tasks for which they were not designed, and to manage tensions their makers did not envision. And perhaps just as important, they struggle to engage stakeholders their formal processes do not acknowledge.

Finally, and most centrally, there is the need for greater attention to questions of justice in water planning. Navigating water conflicts effectively means more than just containing or suppressing them, and thus maintaining in place a status quo that is both inequitable and unsustainable. The principal analytic methods, such as environmental impact assessment, risk assessment, and cost-benefit analysis, typically fail to engage questions of distributive justice. Even when they do nod to these questions, they at best, tag on procedurally thin ‘stakeholder dialogues’ that fail to grapple with unequal power dynamics or the historical roots of inequality that leave some much more vulnerable than others to change.

Attention to such concerns is sometimes framed as a complication that the climate emergency cannot afford. This is short-sighted, both in terms of managing grievances that fuel conflict and in terms of effectively engaging communities and actors who must ‘buy in’ if solutions are to be meaningful.

The Case for Optimism

It is easy to be pessimistic about our capacity to navigate this terrain. Each year, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland conducts a survey on global risk. For several years now, the political and economic elites in attendance have placed water at or near the top of the set of global risks looming ahead—even as they reproduce climate inaction, casino economics, and growing inequality.

Yet, the pressures to create water systems that are more flexible, efficient, and adaptive in the face of uncertainty could open the door to taking a more decentralized, democratic, and environmentally sensitive approach. Innovations in monitoring and communications are making water conditions more transparent and predictable. Traditions of harvesting rainwater and community-scale storage are being rediscovered.

And perhaps most important of all, more people than ever before are participating in water decision making—or fighting for the right to do so, supported by the growing recognition of water as a human right. Disputes about how to manage water may be ubiquitous, but conflict is not inevitable.