South Africa’s largest city, Johannesburg, is facing an unprecedented water shortage affecting millions of people, the result of both shrinking reservoirs and crumbling infrastructure. Water management authorities in the province, which also includes the capital, said that if water consumption isn’t reduced, reservoirs will drop below 10%, at which point they need to be shut down completely to replenish. (AP)
Our Take
This is not the first time Johannesburg has faced a water shortage, but this one is particularly severe, a story that has become all too familiar. At WPR alone, we’ve covered increasingly severe water shortages and droughts affecting countries from Tunisia and Iran to seemingly all of Latin America. Water scarcity is no longer an exceptional story—it is now a throughline in global politics.
Tensions between states over access to water sources—usually transboundary rivers—tend to receive the most attention, because they are often framed by potential conflict. For instance, Ethiopia’s decision to build a mega-dam on the Nile River has led to friction with Egypt, fueling concerns of a major “water war.” So far, though, cooperation over water has been more common than conflict. And cross-border water-trading deals have become increasingly normal between states, even if trade law hasn’t kept up.
Water scarcity has important implications at the local level as well, though. Lack of access to water fuels insecurity, which in turn fuels social instability, polarization and even conflict. We’ve seen this over the past decade in the Sahel region of West Africa, where decreasing availability of arable land and water has sparked farmer-herder violence.
Of course, the elephant in the room here is climate change, which has not only increased average temperatures but also changed weather patterns across the globe. Meanwhile, the green transition itself requires resources that are water-intensive to mine, leading to water shortages in local communities.
Put simply, water scarcity fueled by climate change is now a global human security challenge. As a result, water management will likely begin to play a more prominent role in discussions about mitigating climate change, as well as in strategies for adaptation in places that have already been irreversibly affected by climate change. Evidently, that list is growing fast.
U.N. agencies have warned that waste from electronics is piling up at an alarming rate across the globe, with some 62 million tons of e-waste generated in 2022 and just 22% of it properly collected and recycled.
E-waste that isn’t recycled is either sent to landfills, incinerated or shipped to less developed countries. In all cases, it pollutes the environment. And the problem is only expected to get worse. As Renee Cho wrote in 2020: “As humanity’s use of, and dependence on, technology expands, the e-waste situation is becoming simply unsustainable.”
French President Emmanuel Macron is expected to urge European leaders at today’s EU summit to embrace his proposal for issuing joint bonds to finance defense spending, a plan that Germany adamantly opposes.
The United States’ shifting priorities, as well as the prospect of a second term for former U.S. President Donald Trump, have recently reinvigorated the debate over Europe’s ability to defend itself, with Macron leading the charge for strategic autonomy. As Gesine Weber wrote last month, Europeans will have to shoulder a much more significant burden in European security themselves in the foreseeable future.
The top prosecutor in Venezuela has announced arrest warrants for the presidential campaign manager of Maria Corina Machado as well as eight of her staffers. Machado won the opposition’s primary last year but has since been banned from running by the Maduro regime.
The crisis in Venezuela, which is unlikely to improve ahead of—or after—upcoming elections in July, is just one of three facing the Biden administration in Latin America, as James Bosworth writes.
Election Results
Indonesian Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto has officially won the country’s presidential election, confirming unofficial results. Read about the legacies he will inherit in this Daily Review.
A center-right alliance has officially won Portugal’s recent elections by a slim margin and is set to form a minority government, cutting out the far-right party that surged in this election. Read more about the rise of the far right in Portugal in this Daily Review.