Water, Politics, Conflict in North West Africa

Climate change is expected to alter the quantity and spatial distribution of rainfall across Africa, this will have ensuing impacts on water systems ( Carter & Parker, 2009 ) and especially groundwater recharge functions which are becoming increasingly vital to water accessibility in the anthropocene ( Scheumann & Alker, 2009 ), despite scientific understanding of groundwater aquifers being notably underdeveloped. Reports evidencing the decline of the water table across groundwater aquifers point towards risks of irreversible salinization of groundwater as human reliance on it increases (ibid, 2009). Furthermore due to the specificity of the geological formation per aquifer, there is no common rule for how changing water levels in one area will affect another area of the aquifer, nor rules as to recharge rate or how human impact will create change. In the case of ancient groundwater aquifers such as the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System, its substantial depth results in the irre...

Having taken a few weeks off blogging has given me the opportunity to review previous posts, especially my introductory post where I outlined what I thought would be the focus of this blog, that of conflict and water. So the aim of this short post will be to explain and reflect on the reorientation of my focus. In my introduction I started by purporting the causational relationship between water scarcity and conflict, but actually ended up looking mainly at the relationship between citizen and state materialised through water and sanitation infrastructure.  Why this focus? Firstly the literature on such a topic is more widely extensive, as well as further research has displayed that the supposed relationship between water scarcity and conflict is more tenuous than presupposed. A study by Giordano et al ( 2002 ) aiming to quantify whether water scarcity is causative of transboundary conflict via the case study of Israel, India, and South Africa, indicate that national water-rel...