Ladies and gentlemen, friends, distinguished colleagues. A year has passed since last we met. It is always a deep and lasting pleasure for me to return to such a beautiful city and such an impressive gathering of people. And to such an impressive city and beautiful gathering of people.

Before I offer my thoughts on dams, rivers, war and peace, let me first thank the Swedish Government and Royalty for playing a lead role in keeping water at the forefront of the global policy agenda, where it belongs. I also thank the leaders of the Stockholm Water Foundation, in particular, for recognition through your prestigious annual Water Prize.

I recently read what may be the first and certainly most eloquent words on the topic of environmental scarcity and water security. Mark Twain lived in a frontier California that was, a century ago, hot, drought- and flood-prone, mosquito-ridden, politically-unstable, economically stagnant - a condition closely resembling many nations today. "In the West," he wrote, "whiskey's for drinking, and water's for fighting over."

As a devoted lover of Irish whiskey, I can confirm the truth behind the first part of his assertion. Indeed, I could wax eloquent and rhapsodise over the advantages of single malt as against blended, the merits of serving 'neat' or 'on the rocks.' But lest I encounter any disagreement, with no 'proof' at hand, I shall reserve my energies for later tonight.

It is the latter half of Twain's then-unconventional now widely accepted hypothesis - that "water is for fighting over"- which concerns us, and which I shall quite seriously test. For if true, it has grave implications for water security within and between all nations. It demands hypersensitive development of all rivers, lakes or aquifers which cross political boundaries. Yet it also requires a bit of caution: for I note that this "Water War" rhetoric escalated almost exactly as 'Cold War' rhetoric declined.

The shadow of scarcity

To be sure, scarcity alone is cause for concern. Though our planet is blue, less than 2.5 percent of our water is fresh, less than 33 percent of fresh water is fluid, less than 1.7 percent of all fluid waters run in our streams. And we have been stopping even these. This century we dammed our rivers at unprecedented rates of one per hour, and, since 1950, at an unprecedented scales of 40,000 dams more than four stories high.

As one who authorised the next stage of one of the largest dams in Africa I can say that nations built, and continue to build, for sound reasons. Dams store, use and divert water for consumption, irrigation, cooling, transportation, construction, mills, power and recreation. Dams remove water from the Ganges, Amazon, Danube or Columbia to grow cities on their banks. When it comes to parting - or imparting - the waters, dams are our oldest tool. Yet are they our only tool, or even our best option?

To pursue that question, the South Africa-based World Commission on Dams, which I chair, has undertaken an independent, comprehensive global review. For two years we have been "testing the waters." On Nov. 16 our Final Report will answer that question with authority. But just as water scarcity drove the construction of dams, scarcity also drives the Commission's work. There is no substitute for the water that sustains us; even my "uisce bahara" Irish for "water of life," must be offset with real H2O. We daily deplete what water remains, and it is no overstatement to call it "a crisis of biblical proportions." In Ecclesiastes, recall the passage:

One generation passeth away,
and another generation cometh:
but the earth abideth always....
All rivers runneth to the sea,
yet the sea is not full...

The words are beautiful, haunting and, suddenly, anachronistic. For they are not true due to growth, change and developments during our lives. Even degraded rivers seldom totally runneth at all, but loiter in a chain of reservoirs. In some years our mightiest rivers - Africa's Nile, Asia's Yellow, America's Colorado, Australia's Murray - do not reach the sea.

As rivers shrivel, freshwater ecosystems can't abideth. As another generation cometh more people hunger and thirst for less food and water. Despite existing dams, pipes, canals and levees, 1.2 billion people, or one in five world-wide, lack access to safe drinking water. Three billion, or half the world, lack sanitation; millions passeth away from waterborne disease. Farmers compete with booming cities for water. In a decade we drain aquifers that took centuries to fill. In dry regions, saltwater pollutes groundwater miles from sea. In China, Mexico, India, water tables fall a metre a year, and the earth above subsides upon them. Worse, in 2025 we must find a fifth more water for 3 billion new people, shoved against the hard wall of finite supply. By then, one in three will struggle just to find water to drink and bathe, much less grow food.

This scarcity sounds bleak, and it is. But some see it as the brighter side of troubling water security issues. They say scarcity locks developed and developing nations in a fierce, competitive struggle in which governments must satisfy the thirst, hunger and hygiene of a nation's restless millions, no matter the cost. It is their national interest. And thus, they maintain, when rivers cross borders and are consumed both within and between countries, water scarcity leads to water stress, which leads to water wars.

Trans-boundary waters

Indeed, never before have stakes been higher, players more numerous, the field more complex. In 1978 there were 214 international basins; with the break-up of the Soviet Union and formation of the Balkan states, there are now 261. These rivers cover 45.3 percent of the land surface of the earth, and carry 80 percent of its available fresh water. They cover 145 nations; and 21 nations, such as Bangladesh, lie entirely within a shared basin.

It is true that stress, tensions and disputes are inevitable, in and between nations. Water, or even sediment, used or diverted by you, upstream, is not available for me, struggling downstream. I am likely to get "tight jaws" over your plans to develop it. In anger we may exchange words, or lawsuits, or…much worse. In a number of so-called "hot spots" and "flashpoints" around the globe - the Middle East, Southern Africa, South Asia or the Nile, water diplomats negotiate even as I speak.

Chorus of doom

A century after Mr Twain's lonely solo, the tune "water's for fighting over" has escalated into a global symphony, with drumbeat, full orchestra and halleluja chorus:

• In 1991, my World Water co-Commissioner Asit Biswas predicted that "the political tensions between certain neighbouring countries over the use of international rivers, lakes and aquifers may escalate to the point of war, even before we move into the 21st Century."



• Four years later, World Bank vice-president for environmentally sustainable development, my friend Ismail Serageldin warned, "wars of the next century will be over water," not oil.



• "My fear is that we're headed for a period of water wars between nations," Klaus Töpfer, head of the UN Environment Programme, said recently. "Can we afford that, in a world of globalisation and tribalisation, where conflicts over natural resources and the numbers of environmental refugees are already growing?"



• "Battles have been fought over water allocation in many other countries," asserts Mikhail Gorbachev. "The potential for a conflict over water is perhaps at its most serious in the Middle East where water supplies are extremely limited, political tensions traditionally run high, and water is just one of the issues that may divide countries."

With all due respect to my friends, have battles been fought over water? Is water scarcity a casus belli? Does it in fact divide nations? My own answer is no, no and no. I recognise the obvious value to sensational Water War rhetoric. Alarmists awaken people to the underlying reality of water scarcity, and rally troops to become more progressive and interdependent. By contrast, to challenge or dispute that rhetoric is to risk making us passive or smug about the status quo, or delay badly needed innovations or co-operation against stress.

And yet I do challenge 'Water War' rhetoric. For there is no hard evidence to back it up. If the 'water's-for-fighting' chorus is off key, then its disharmony affects lives as well. It shifts energy and resources from local priorities to foreign affairs. It scares off investment where it is most in need. It inverts priorities, delays implementation of policy. And it forgets that water management is, ultimately, about real people. Mahatma Gandhi said, "When you are unsure of a course of action, remember the face of the poorest, weakest person in society and ask yourself what impact the action you are about to take will have on that person." More recently Nelson Mandela reiterated that democratic systems lose their validity if they fail to combat and eradicate poverty.

We thus would be well advised to remember that, for the poorest and weakest, water's for drinking, not fighting over. The poor are most affected by rhetoric, just as they are by war. It is easier to ignore their thirst than to divert attention to potential foreign threats, real or imagined. Easier, not better. To help the poor and weak, let us reform our unstable, consumptive, ultra-nationalistic habits to share our resource.

That requires a paradigm shift. In the past we have often overdeveloped trans-national waters based on the needs of top-down national strategic policies; perhaps we now must develop bottom-up national strategic policies based on the needs of our critical trans-national waters. This is not radical, or even unusual. It grows out of the history of conflict resolution on our border-crossing rivers; among the first was the USA.

USA's experience

Borders become battlegrounds whenever push of trade turns to shove of war over resources, like oil. No two nations share a larger border than the US and Canada. Half of that border consists of lakes, rivers, aquifers. A peaceful, watery border. But then, one century ago, a group of Montana farmers proposed to construct a few dams on the St. Mary's River. No one ever asked the farmers, and voters, downstream in Canada for their opinion, or their consent, about the American dams.

In retaliation, Canada vowed to divert and drain another river, the Milk, before it flowed into the US. Sabres rattled. Diplomats assembled. Bellicosity mixed with patriotism and escalated into rumours of war.

Does this sound familiar? It should. The odds are that any of the 145 nations who share a common river will disagree with each other over the use of that river. And since 'use' almost invariably requires dams, dams become a critical focal point in almost every nation's foreign policy. In wet or dry years, in rainy or arid climates, as people reduce rivers to trickles, foreign policy tests dams again and again:

• Turkey's plans to build a complex of 20 dams on the Euphrates River, upstream from fast-growing and chronically drought-prone Syria, brought an exchange of tensions, leverage, and threats, like former Prime Minister Ozals' that Turkey might cut off the river's water.



• On the Indus, Pakistan warned in no uncertain terms that water cut off by a dam upstream in India would lead to trouble; Indian warned back against flood damage from Pakistan's downstream dam.



• The Nile River has been seen as another area of tension between both upstream and downstream countries.



• On Parana River, Argentina fiercely opposed plans by Brazil and Paraguay to construct the world's biggest hydrodam because it would expropriate Argentina's own natural resources.



• In the Middle East, the one thing that Israel's Prime Minister Barak, Jordan's King Abdullah and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat can all agree upon is that failure to resolve territorial and self-determination issues could result in a conflict worse than all previously seen in the region, and water scarcity is a reflection of larger political problems.

The Historical Evidence

I have seen sovereign states and ethnic groups within nations go to war over every resource - oil, land, humans, diamonds, gas, livestock, or gold - but never, interestingly, over renewable resources, and never, in particular, over water development and dams. True, water has never been more scarce, and there is always a first time for anything. But there is also a difference between reaching a snapping point, and snapping; between being pushed to the brink of conflict over water and waging a water war.

For two years, the World Commission on Dams has explored that difference. We explore not only the role dams play among peoples and nations, but equally important, we examine the strategic role of dams between them, asking: Does our need for water divide us, or unite us?

The latest US policy - a multi-million dollar agenda which grew out of a meeting of its intelligence, military diplomatic and executive officials - asserts that competition over water and dams leads to conflict. But such a policy is betrayed by the country's own history. For like the other competitive nations, Canada and the US nearly went to war over water; they manoeuvred over rivers and dams, they went eyeball to eyeball, and then, like riparian nations everywhere have always done, they both blinked.

Why? There is of course no one clear or easy answer why peace broke out over water there, and elsewhere. No universal secret, no 'magic bullet' emerges. But there are rational clues, or principles, to consider as potential reasons. And all share one common denominator. Water.

Water: catalyst for co-operation

Indeed, just as rain does not start but rather cools and suppresses fire, so water, by its very nature, tends to induce even hostile co-riparian countries to co-operate, even as disputes rage over other issues. The weight of historical evidence demonstrates that organised political bodies have signed 3600 water related treaties since AD 805. Of seven minor water-related skirmishes in that time all began over non-water issues. Most dealt with navigation and borders, but since 1814 states have negotiated a smaller proportion of treaties over flood control, water management, hydropower projects and allocation for consumptive and non-consumptive use.

There are strategic reasons. Of all the 261 trans-boundary waters, in only a few cases: (1) is the downstream country utterly dependent on the river for water; (2) can the upstream country restrict the river's flow; (3) is there a legacy of antagonism between riparians; and (4) is the downstream country militarily stronger than upstream.

Another reason involves scale and focus. For water peace to emerge, negotiators think local, act local, and draft treaties that stem from local water project on a specific local river, lake or aquifer that straddles two or more nations. These appear to have more real and lasting authority than broad, vague, undefined agreements with far reaching scope but little impact. This does not mean that states should not ratify the UN Convention on Shared Water Courses, as such ratification would reflect a willingness to be bound by co-operative incentives, in which agreement over water leads to other things. North America's water treaties covering fisheries, acid rain, navigation, climate change, the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence and the Columbia Basin - expanded directly from that tiny, focused accord between farmers a century ago.

Yet another reason involves communication: keep talking before, during and after a project. Prior notification of water development plans goes a long way towards water security. This does not mean nations must obtain consent, or permission, for national interest comes first. To notify is not to end water disputes, or potential for stress and tension. But it engages both, or all riparian parties, in a frank discussion from which "good faith negotiation" helps define where national interests, for a finite resource, compete and where, like a river or aquifer, they overlap and can be shared. In the treaty between Argentina and Brazil, the very principles that were at issue in the dispute - prior notification and consultation - were enshrined in the agreement that resolved it.

We must also consider gender in turning water into a catalyst for peace. In recent years I have been speaking of what I call the "feminisation of politics and policy." This is not a matter of quotas or tokenism. It is how women transform the decision making process, they see water less as a weapon, or as an economic resource than a basis for their family's health; water to women is something to share, not fight over.

Water also becomes a catalyst for peace over equity. Most treaties that allocate quantity or quality between states, or establish ground rules for management, reflect the principle of equity, or equitable use. This may seem odd, when there is not a perfect balance of power between nations. And the definition of equitable varies from case to case, and according to facts and circumstance. But in this regard water, a potentially renewable resource, can be a common denominator, a leveler in the search for equity. The negotiated result may not be what a national spokesman or leader tells in the press. Between Pakistan and India, or the US and Mexico, both countries announced "they don't have the right to our water," then sat down and work out an equitable solution. Altruism and solidarity, as in the agreement between India and Bangladesh, can provide the basis for future collaboration, if the political will is there. Nations may vow war, then quietly broker equitable water for peace.

Stress and tension may be offset by the variety of options available. In some cases the benefits - irrigation, consumption, power, even recreation - derived from a shared water resource will vary between riparian states, and these needs become grounds for negotiation. Nepal wanted hydropower, India irrigation; South Africa's Johannesburg wanted urban consumption, Lesotho electricity. Those countries united to build dams that split one shared river into diverse benefits.

Water scarce regions, like the Middle East, give rise to a concept of "virtual water," in which grain imports bought with oil or high tech revenues, offsets the demand for irrigation dams. Desalination plants may be viable where rainfall can't match urban growth.

The mobility of currency, and purchasing power for water, acts as an incentive to make allies of former antagonists. Cash-for-water may also be a catalyst for peace when a third party like the World Bank or Export-Import Bank, or bilateral credit agencies, withhold funds for water development until competing riparian states resolve any and all disputes related to the water allocation.

International water law increasingly plays a role. Many countries are upstream in one case, downstream in another, sometimes with the same countries, or others. Exceptional midstream cases, like Gabcikovo-Nagymaros Dam between Hungary and the Czech Republic, shows the complexity and difficulty of legal compliance. But the more participatory the negotiations, the less likely tension over water will escalate, and those that do can resolve their disputes before the International Court of Justice, or the United Nations, with positive results.

No modern wars have been fought over actual use of water. But wars over other issues, like religion or oil, may and do lead to targeting of water supplies and projects. Yet even here water may bring countries together. Protocol I of the 1977 Geneva Convention relating to the Laws of War specifically prohibits any attack on "objects" indispensable to the survival of a civilian population such as food, drinking water installations and supplies or irrigation works, whatever the motives. Nor, for that matter, shall these be attacked if impacts release, or remove, dangerous volumes of water on civilian populations. This international law dimension reflects the feeling of urgency by the international community and no breach of this provision should be committed in the name of "total war," whether concerned with regional forces or with individual states. Breaching this law must be considered a war crime, whether employed by one side during the Gulf War fought over oil, or by the other during the bombing of Belgrade, fought over culture, ethnicity and religion.

A final reason is that there is something about water unique from other resources. Despite scarcity, water is renewable; water is dispersed. Water shifts with season and place. Water quantity changes human behavior, and how a nation values it. Some water rich countries come up short of supply, while some water poor countries feel they have an abundance to meet their demands. To cut off water is to cut off human life. We adapt.

I might speculate further that water, and water alone, has an intrinsic spiritual element lacking in oil, gold, gas, copper, uranium even diamonds. In nearly every culture, religious values are embedded in water, which baptises, purifies, bathes, cleanses. I will not include this reason here; this is a policy lecture, not a theological sermon.

Conclusion: Look Inward

For some of these reasons, nations repeatedly unite over water. In all cases, what could - and by all indications, should - erupt into violence and escalation over resource competition and environmental stress instead healed, like a scar or broken bone, into something stronger than before tensions flared. Hot words over resources were cooled by shared water. The first small water treaties spur later agreements over trade, weapons, transport, communications or fisheries.

Somehow nations resolve their trans-national water stress without the help of great powers. And yet when looking at potential water conflicts elsewhere in the world, superpowers appear to forget their own history. Insofar as Secretary of State seeks to foster the growth of these river-specific treaties through the United Nations, World Bank or International Court of Justice has done in the past, fine. Judicial or multi-lateral dispute settlements is the only way, if we are to move away from great power politics that verges on hegemony: "Water War" rhetoric should not replace the vacuum left by the Cold War's end.

For no nations have gone to war strictly over water and, even with supply running low, let me go on record to say that I doubt they ever will. That is not naivete, or even blind optimism. That is a belief - based on our growing awareness of water scarcity weighed against the historical evidence of water as a catalyst for co-operation - that we can infuse each generation who comes with the capacity, understanding and political will to experience, use and enjoy waters as much as our own generation has.

To that end, I recognise that the Swedish Government has declared its intention to increase water development capacity, not by launching some brash new global agenda, but through quiet co-operation among networks and institutions that already exist. The Global Water Partnership, Stockholm Environment Institute, Stockholm International Water Institute and the Swedish Environmental Research Institute - each a dynamic, focused organisation in its own right - have united to tackle international water issues under one roof: the Stockholm Water House. It will lead by example, respond to demand, be anchored by science, experience and the historical evidence. I applaud your initiative. This represents a great consensus about water and international changes in which scientists and humanists help national policy leaders rise above the purely consumptive instincts of private and individual self-interest.

Through such steady, bottom-up co-operation, informed by sound analysis - rather than top-down agendas driven by alarmist rhetoric - we may discover that all this time we thought mankind could absolutely own water, the reverse is more accurate. Waters own us. Rivers cross, rush alongside and seep beneath our borders. They ignore passports, tariffs, and uniformed customs officials as they go. While we seek order and control and fortify our borders, waters meander freely, wantonly, in search of their destiny.

Rivers transcend borders divided by race, wealth, culture, politics, religion, ideology and the consumptive self-interest of nations. To ensure water security for all, the time has come in which humanity must transcend these borders as well.

Twain was exactly wrong. We may step outside to decide what to do about scarcity of whiskey. But as for water, it was never in the past, is not now and will not be in the future - for fighting over. Water is for conserving. Water is for bathing. Water is for drinking. Water is for sharing. Water is the catalyst for peace.

I thank you.