The Great Renaissance Dam

A very current ongoing area of debate and tension is the prospect of the Grand Renaissance Dam (or the Millennium Dam as it is sometimes referred to). The dam is currently under production and seeks to bring hydroelectric power to Ethiopia by harnessing Blue Nile's waters. Upon completion, the dam will be the largest hydroelectric dam in Africa, and as expected Egypt has been strongly against the project as it believes the dam will reduce water temporarily with the filling of the dam and with the effects of long term evaporative losses. Further tho this there could lead to a permanent lowering of water levels in Lake Nasser which on one hand would reduce the evaporative losses from the body of water but will also reduce the ability of the Aswan High Dam to produce hydropower.

Dialogue between concerned Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt has been ongoing for the last 5 years and has been tumultuous at best. Beginning with an International Panel of Experts to review and assess the impacts of the dam, data sharing and collaborative efforts looked to mirror positives of Integrated Water Resources Management, however reports produced by Ethiopia and Egypt ended up differing, in reflection of their interests. In 2013 tensions reached new heights when Egyptian political leaders unknowingly discussed methods on television to destroy the dam whilst discussing the International Panel of Experts report mentioned above with President Morsi. After the meeting Morsi highlighted the embarrassment and promoted "good neighbourliness" however not ruling out conflict in a later speech as "Egypt's water security cannot be violated at all."

After numerous cessations of talks then renegotiating according to some reports an agreement may be reached "on some points" very soon. The most recent talks that have occurred this month, with technical talks taking place the last few days, with reported agreements on studying the impacts of the dam. So after 10 rounds of talks over the past 2 years, it seems that there may be some agreements in principal on the horizon for the project. However, given the up and down nature of talks over the past few years it would be good not to get too optimistic.

This case demonstrates the fragility of relations between the riparian nations, especially Egypt and any country that threatens its water supply from the Nile. It further exemplifies that cooperation is possible but that it occurs over a very lengthy and strenuous amount of time, with conflict still being an outside possibility.

BAR Event Intensity Scale and Basins at Risk

A well known way to categorise the degree of cooperation/competition in a transboundary basin is assigning a level on the BAR event intensity scale. The BAR project was a contribution from UNESCO's International Hydrological Programme and the final product; a database grading all events over the period of 1948-99 was produced by some of the leading academics in the area of transboundary water conflict Aaron Wolf, Shira Yoffe and Mark Giordano. In addition to this, they used the information they compiled to predict the basins at greatest risk of dispute in the near future (5-10 years). I allured to this study in my previous post and thought it required some further investigation.

In creating this intricate database, it involved the compilation and assessment of biophysical, socioeconomic and geopolitical data utilising GIS to determine indicators for future tensions. With all this data and varied sources, the BAR event intensity scale was produced (Table 1).

Table 1. BAR event intensity scale (Source: UNESCO)

The findings from such analysis highlighted the lack of extremes (extreme conflict and extreme cooperation) (Figure 1), that most interactions were cooperative and most mild in intensity, and that the major water related issues are over quantity and infrastructure.

Figure 1. Number events by BAR scale (Source: UNESCO)

Though the data certainly seems to indicate patterns of which this article stresses, I would question a few aspects of their findings and the way they categorise their BAR event intensity. Firstly, they emphasise the lack of conflict in their findings, however though there hasn't been forms of extreme conflict >25% of their events were conflictual of some sort, so it exists, and this number could be even higher if one was to update the dataset for 2015 in the face of Africa's increasing population boom, continuing struggle over resources and impacts of increased climate variability. Another aspect I'd critique is regarding an International Water Treaty as the second highest form of cooperation. As is well known, and demonstrated in some of my previous posts, this does not necessarily mean there is strong widespread cooperation within the basin. In addition to this, as allured to in my previous post, their predictions of basins which are likely to produce conflict in the next 5-10 years (aka 5-10 years ago) have not been entirely accurate, exemplified in the case of the Okavango. 

While frameworks to differentiate between levels of conflict and cooperation such as this one can sometimes be useful, they are based on a number of assumptions that in a lot of cases do not encapsulate the heterogeneity of transboundary river basins.