A geospatial analysis of water-related risk to international security: an assessment of five countries

This paper assesses countries with transboundary water resources that are at risk for instability. Water security, a term we use in our work to refer to an individual’s, community’s or state’s access to freshwater resources at the right time, quality, and quantity, is becoming of increasing concern due to rising populations, development, and climate change. Building upon the Basins at Risk project at Oregon State University, we used updated Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database geospatial physical, social, and hydrological data to assess the water-related stability of countries in transboundary freshwater basins. We selected five countries to conduct case studies by assessing three parameters: percentage of territory within a shared basin, number of shared basins, and/or dependency ratio of a country on water resources originating from outside its borders. Given the availability of data and to cover a wider geographic distribution, we selected Afghanistan, China, Iraq, Moldova, and Sudan as our case studies. We created a series of 30 maps at 2 scales to spatially analyze the population density, institutional capacity, and water withdrawals, in addition to assessing each country’s water profile. We developed a resiliency tool to analyze these parameters and scored each country to determine whether a country is at risk for water-related instability. We found that while China has a high water-related resilience, Iraq has a low water-related resilience and Afghanistan, Moldova, and Sudan fall within a low to mid-low resilience range.