Climate pact process stumbles as countries bicker in Bonn

Terra Daily via AFP: Less than six months after the world agreed to craft a new global climate pact by 2015, talks stumbled at a crucial preparatory meeting Friday as rich and poorer countries butted heads.

With the mood still strained by the fractious 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, negotiations in Bonn showed developed and developing nations split on apportioning responsibility for tackling global warming. Fast-growing countries like China and India insisted the West, which has been polluting more for longer, must shoulder more of the mitigation burden.

Amid fresh delays and procedural wrangling, UN climate chief Christiana Figueres warned the target of pegging global warming to a manageable 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) seemed to be slipping ever further away.

"Current efforts on mitigation are not sufficient, and the doors on improving the probabilities of a maximum two degrees are actually closing in on governments," she said....

Grumpyyoungman01created this map of a false dichotomy argument

Water crisis offers chance for unity over strife

Kanya D'Almeida in IPS has a ray of optimism about water conflicts and the potential for cooperation among neighbors: As record-breaking temperature highs and rapidly melting ice caps fuel fears about impending "water wars", some experts in Washington say that the threat of full-blown conflict is exaggerated, adding that robust institutions and solid treaties could transform water crises into international cooperation.

The planet is currently home to 276 international river basins, which cover almost a half of the earth's land surface and are home to 40 percent of the global population. Many of these basins cross boundaries with no regard for the incendiary politics that divide nations, religions and peoples. In fact, a full 80 percent of the world's fresh water originates in basins shared by two or more countries.

However, while the risk of water wars has long made headlines, new research suggests that possible cooperation over shared resources would be a better, and more accurate, message. "Those of us who work on issues of international water management see only the boundaries of watersheds themselves, we see the things that unite us, that bring us together," Aaron Wolf, a professor of geography at the University of Oregon, told a panel at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington on Thursday.

...The Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (TFDD), a project of Oregon State University's Department of Geosciences in partnership with the Northwest Alliance for Computation Science, carried out extensive research into the history of water-related conflict, referencing over 3,600 international treaties signed between the years 805-1997.

Rating water-related events between the years 1948-2008, the database found only 21 cases of "extensive military acts" compared to 682 instances of "mild verbal support" for treaties. The same period also witnessed the signing of 145 treaties on shared water resources....

The Cumbe Mayo Aqueduct (1500 B.C.E.) near Cajamarca, Peru. Photographer Gsd97jks has released it to the public domain

Sudan: Water secure but Egypt worries over South Sudan

Bikyamasr: The Sudanese government attempted to reassure Egypt over water resources in light of the recent independence of South Sudan. Sudanese Information Minister Sana Hamad al-Awadi said that Khartoum does not believe South Sudan will go against international agreements that give Egypt the lion’s share of Nile River water.

Al-Awadi continued to say that the South is not needed to address the situation, pointing to continued coordination between Sudan and Egypt on Nile Basin deals. The Sudanese minister said that the water, which comes through the White Nile from the south, “does not represent a problem for the Republic of Sudan, because it represents about 14 percent of the water coming through the south to Sudan” and ultimately Egypt.

However, with the infant new country, Egypt has a number of worries that South Sudan, which now sees itself in control of much of the Nile water and its path toward Egypt, could join the opposition to Cairo and Khartoum over maintaining what many upstream nations say is an “unjust” water-sharing agreement.

“We are certainly concerned over the future of our water security, but we must give South Sudan time to see what is right,” said Amr Hassan, an environment ministry official. Egypt has already attempted to throw some carrots to Juba through infrastructure projects, including at least four electricity stations.

Cairo has repeatedly refused to sign onto any convention without assurances by other Nile Basin Initiative members that the country would not lose the 55.5 billion cubic meters of Nile water they are allowed to use and demanded a veto power over any projects implemented upstream in southern Nile nations....

Map of South Sudan from the CIA's World Factbook, July 12, 2011

Egypt warns that new Nile agreement could prove a 'death sentence'

Daniel Howden in the Independent (UK): … Two treaties signed more than half a century ago gave Egypt the lion's share of the water from the Nile. But those deals, so crucial to one country, also set up an epic imbalance of resources that has led analysts to look to this river system as the likely theatre for the first of the long-heralded water wars. Now a fresh crisis has emerged to threaten Cairo's hegemony of this most political of rivers as five of the 10 Nile basin countries have signed up to a new agreement that would give them a greater share of the waters and has been greeted in the Egyptian press as a "death sentence".

…Countries like Ethiopia, which accounts for 85 per cent of the river's flow, never recognised the "colonial relic" treaties and are now seeking to right what they see as a historical wrong. "Some people in Egypt have old-fashioned ideas based on the assumption that the Nile water belongs to Egypt," Ethiopia's premier Meles Zenawi said recently. "But the circumstances have changed and changed forever."

Under pressure from upstream countries, Egypt agreed to take part in the Nile Basin initiative set up in Uganda's Entebbe on the shore of Lake Victoria in 1999. While Cairo saw it as a talking shop with a mandate to share scientific data, the other states saw it as an opportunity to renegotiate the use of the Nile.

…Behind the heated rhetoric of death sentences and lifeblood most observers believe that the current crisis will be resolved politically rather than militarily. The era in which Egyptian foreign policy was based on backing insurgencies and destabilising its southern neighbours may have past. David Grey, a visiting professor at Oxford University and senior water advisor to the World Bank, says the Nile Basin initiative for all its failures suggests a future in which shared water resources could yoke together former adversaries rather than divide them.

…The bigger question is not whether a more equitable sharing of the Nile can avert a war, but whether the overexploited river can continue to meet the growing demands placed on it…..

Papyrus growing wild along the banks of the Nile River in Uganda, taken by Michael Shade in the fall of 2006