Water, conflict, and the elusive hope for environmental peacebuilding in a warming world

By Dr. Florian Krampe, Director of Studies, Peace and Development and Director and Senior Researcher, Climate Change and Risk Programme, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)

The Soča River, with its turquoise water carving its way through Slovenia’s Julian Alps, offers a striking paradox: its breathtaking beauty is set against a backdrop of historical trauma. I came to know its currents intimately in my early twenties, working as a kayak teacher in Bovec, drawn in by the clarity of the water, the raw power of its rapids and eddies, and the lush green forests framing the steep canyons and wide sandy banks it had carved.

Yet, this beauty belies a darker history: the valley was once a stage for immense human suffering. Paddling along its currents, one notices the dark, hollow eyes of tunnels in the sheer rock face, supply cable cars, and cemeteries—remnants of another kind of current: history and violence, captured memorably by Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. Amidst the brutal fighting between the Austro-Hungarian and Italian armies, war was going on, and the river was going on.

The battles of the Isonzo Front reflect a time when control of the natural landscape – its valleys, its peaks, and its river crossings – was paramount for military strategy. A century later, the notion of control over the landscape has re-emerged. However, the battlefield has shifted. Today, the struggle is no longer for valleys or peaks but for water, a struggle amplified by a rapidly changing climate, fast becoming the defining security challenge of our time.

The story of the Soča River reminds us of the tragic cost of division and war. Yet the river’s enduring presence also offers an elusive hope, rooted not in control but in cooperation.

The escalating cascade

A warming climate disrupts the global water cycle with an intensity that alters the very predictability of life. Climate change makes the availability of freshwater dangerously unreliable. The result is a new geography of risk where the likelihood of conflict rises with the floodwaters and spreads with the drought. The modern battlefield is no longer confined to front lines. Instead, it shifts to the riverbanks and farmsteads of the world’s most vulnerable societies.

This escalation is not random. The impacts of climate change on water availability follow distinct pathways that amplify existing social, political, and economic tensions. They begin with the degradation of livelihoods, especially in agrarian societies where competition over dwindling water can quickly turn into tensions. In Afghanistan, the strain is so severe that in 2014, an estimated 93% of disputes settled through traditional mediation were linked to land and water. These pressures drive displacement and migration, as in Iraq, where widespread water scarcity has driven families from rural lands to the cities, straining urban infrastructure and services and inflaming tensions between resident and migrant communities.

In Somalia’s Shabelle River Basin, these dynamics have dangerously exacerbated social hierarchies: after floods displaced minority clans, more powerful groups often seized their lands, deepening divisions in the face of environmental shocks.

This environment of grievance and instability creates an opportunity for a more sinister dynamic: the tactical exploitation of water by armed groups. They intervene not to resolve tensions but to capitalize on them. Their tactics can be brutally direct: in Somalia, al-Shabab has destroyed wells to sabotage relief efforts and assert control. The Islamic State in Iraq weaponized water infrastructure by capturing the Mosul and Falluja dams and using control over water to secure support, demonstrating how easily this essential resource can become a tool of war.

And after the war

These challenges are amplified exponentially in post-conflict regions where shattered institutions and evaporated trust create a landscape where any mismanagement of resources can derail peace. Here, my research reveals a critical lesson: when international peacebuilders and national governments address water as a purely technical problem, they neglect its deeply political nature and risk making a bad situation worse.

This technocratic failure has consequences. In Herat, Afghanistan, the Salma Dam was built as a flagship development project, yet poor management that prioritized hydropower led to increased water scarcity downstream, fuelling grievances and igniting a violent conflict over a new weir. In Kosovo, the international community fell into a similar trap after 1999, avoiding the political complexities of the conflict by allowing separate water governance for Serbs and Albanians in the city of Mitrovica—a decision that entrenched ethnic division rather than bridging it.

Elsewhere, the story is the same as in Afghanistan and Kosovo: in the fractured foundations of a post-conflict society, water is never just water. It is tied to identity, power, and the perceived legitimacy of the state. Treating its governance as an apolitical task is a political decision—one that can entrench conflict, generate new violence, and fatally undermine the hope for a sustainable peace.

And yet, as Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” It is in this potential for strength, this potential for resilience in the face of ruin, that the work of environmental peacebuilding must begin.

Charting a new course

While the risk of water-related conflict is real and headlines often fixate on the specter of ‘water wars,’ the reality on the ground is more nuanced. Cooperation over scarce resources, it turns out, is far more common than conflict.

In fact, these shared environmental challenges hold a hidden opportunity: a chance to leverage cooperation as a tool for building peace. This is the subtle hope of environmental peacebuilding: the idea that shared environmental challenges, if managed with an understanding of their political and social realities, can become opportunities to build a more resilient society.

My research identifies three key mechanisms for environmental peacebuilding, each grounded in practical human experience. When adversarial groups cooperate on a shared, practical goal—managing a watershed, for instance—the process can begin to erode prejudice. In Nepal, the shared labor of building micro-hydropower projects did more than provide power; it strengthened local trust and cohesion. Through environmental cooperation, however, broader principles of good governance can also take root. The inclusion of women on a water user committee is never just about water management; it is a powerful step towards transforming gender norms and strengthening civil society. Ultimately, environmental cooperation holds the opportunity for the state to be seen as an effective steward of essential water-related services. It strengthens the social contract. It builds its legitimacy from the ground up.

For any of this to work, however, respecting the primacy of politics is paramount. As the example from the Salma Dam in Afghanistan and the divided water systems in Kosovo demonstrate, treating a deeply political problem as a mere engineering one is doomed to fail. Top-down solutions that neglect local context are particularly dangerous. In East Timor, for example, international actors rolled out a water management model based on Western ideas of geography, failing to recognize that Timorese society is structured around kinship. The result was not cooperation but new disputes over water access. This is the ‘boomerang effect’ or maladaptation where well-intentioned but context-blind interventions produce the opposite of their intended result.

From the Soča’s echoes to global resonance

I began with the image of the Soča River, a place where the memory of immense conflict is etched into the landscape. The river, which saw the futility of the Isonzo Front, offers an enduring lesson. Its currents flow past the relics of that devastating war, reminding us of the tragic cost of division. Yet the river’s persistence also speaks to the resilience of the natural world and the people living around it.

The river is going on, and so must our approach to peace and security move beyond the rigid thinking of a bygone era. Climate change is not a future problem. It is a present-day reality that fundamentally alters the security landscape and, with it, the very meaning of building peace.

This demands a paradigm shift in perception: to see shared waters not merely as potential flashpoints for conflict but as necessary arenas for cooperation and the construction of a common future. This is the very shift that Slovenia, a nation whose history is carved by its rivers and whose lands once served as the tragic stage for warring empires, has begun to translate into action. By enshrining the right to water in its constitution, Slovenia shows the power to transform water into a powerful, modern commitment to cooperation.

The choice is to either continue financing risks or begin financing resilience. It is the choice to move beyond the illusion of simple technical solutions and instead commit to the patient, painstaking political work of building trust from the ground up. There are no panaceas in peacemaking, not even environmental peacebuilding, but it is an essential pillar of twenty-first-century statecraft, based on the understanding that shared waters can either be a source of enduring conflict or a wellspring of a just and sustainable peace.