When Water Becomes a National Security Issue
WHEN WATER BECOMES A NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUE
Dr Anthony Turton
Centre for Environmental Management University of Free State
Abstract
Water is often perceived merely as a domestic utility, yet it underpins national security and economic stability. This article explores how transboundary water systems—such as the Columbia and St Lawrence Rivers in North America, and the Chobe and Orange Rivers in southern Africa—serve as strategic assets governed by treaties, historical precedent, and geopolitical interests. Through case studies, it illustrates how water control influences migration, capital flow, and local economic resilience. The concept of water as a driver of human flourishing is likened to osmosis, suggesting that skills and capital naturally migrate toward areas of greater water security. The paper argues that effective water governance is essential for national security, and that policy reform must align with the environmental stimuli that shape human and economic movement. Without such alignment, infrastructure collapses, social instability rises, and capital retreats—making water security a prerequisite for sustainable development and peace.
Keywords
- • Water security
- • National security
- • Transboundary rivers
- • Columbia River Treaty
- • St Lawrence Seaway
- • Kasikili/Sedudu Island
- • Orange River border
- • Thalweg principle
- • Migration and capital flow
- • Policy reform
- • Infrastructure stress
- • Southern Africa geopolitics
- • Hydropolitics
- • Economic resilience
- • Environmental stimuli
- • Osmosis analogy
- • Human flourishing
- • Border demarcation
- • Colonial legacy
- • International law
People typically take water for granted without so much as a second thought about it. They mostly think of it as the stuff that comes out of their taps, and occasionally they might realize that it flushes the toilets we use and washes the cars we drive.
This is overly simplistic of course, but the reality is something far different, because water lies at the very foundation of national security. The best current example is to be found in the Columbia River and the St Lawrence River basins shared between Canada and the USA. Both are governed by treaty, and both are vital to the national economy. The Columbia River provides the largest source of hydropower in the USA, but the headwaters are in Canada, now refusing to become the 51st state. The sixty-year-old treaty that has governed the management of the river is up for renegotiation, and it is no longer business as usual. The St Lawrence seaway, a true marvel of nature, enables oceangoing ships to penetrate deep into the hinterland of both countries, sustaining trade in landlocked states that would otherwise be forced to use costly road transport to access harbours. Movement of people across the St Lawrence has been unrestricted for decades, and the 1,864 islands are generally regarded as valuable real estate, each with local economies entirely dependent on goodwill and the free movement of people.
Suddenly, water lies at the heart of national security in both Canada and the USA.
It is no different in southern Africa. For example, there is a small island in the Chobe River between Botswana and Namibia named Kasikili/Sedudu in each of the riparian states respectively. The sovereign ownership of the island became relevant when Namibia gained its independence. Sensitive towards border demarcation, it took the case to the International Court of Justice in 1996, claiming territorial sovereignty by virtue of historic precedent. The court ruled against Namibia, citing the international norm as recognising the thalweg of the river as the actual border. The thalweg is the deepest river channel, but in highly dynamic hydraulic environments, this changes over time. In fact, it can change during one extreme flood event.
This lies at the very heart of the lower Orange River, where the international boundary has been set as the highwater mark on the northern bank of the river. I recently had a call from a Namibian farmer expressing grave concern over this fact, saying that the porosity of this border is of growing concern. He blamed South Africa for not adequately policing the border with Namibia, alleging a range of criminal activities including stock theft, poaching and illegal smuggling of gemstones. The reason that this particular border demarcation ignores the international legal norm of using the thalweg to define the actual border between two riparian states dates back to the colonial era when hostilities existed between Britain and Germany. The British colonial authorities administering the Cape Colony believed that a permanent German settlement could be prevented by denying what was then German South-West Africa (SWA) access to reliable flows from the Orange. Given the fact that the Orange River experiences extremes between high and low flow, it was believed that the highwater mark on the northern bank would mean that SWA would be unable to develop any sizeable settlements along the border with the Cape Colony.
The driver of this decision was national security and perceptions of threat.
These simple case studies all have one thing in common. At the heart of each is the control of a resource that adds value to a local economy on which social stability and financial prosperity is dependent. We can therefore develop the conceptual link between water and the economic health of a local economy, or even a nation as an amalgamation of many smaller local economies.
Let us tease this out in more detail.
Control of water creates security, of which there are many forms. Control over floodwaters, creates security from being inundated and drowned during high flows. Flood control typically uses a dam, or a series of dams, to attenuate peak flows. Control of captured water in turn means that during periods of natural low flow – what we might call local drought conditions – society will be buffered from the debilitating impact and simply continue with business as usual. Control over water therefore generates security upon which society can start to flourish. People are migratory in nature, so they will naturally move from areas of low security to areas of greater security. With that migration comes capital in various forms, including human skills and financial resources. Both of these flow, exactly as water does, from areas of low security to areas of higher security.
We can start to think of this as a natural law, along the same lines as osmosis being the unstoppable flow of water across a membrane that separates fluid of different densities or mineral concentrations. Osmosis is the foundation of biological life, which is universally applicable, so maybe we can start to think of the flow of skills and capital as being of a similar status as a universally accepted truth?
If we accept this simple notion – that skills and capital flow in response to stimuli found in the environment in which they exist – then we can start to build a model of national security in which water is a central feature. From this we can begin to map out the necessary conditions for the optimization of those flows. We call this policy, and there will be a range of options to choose from in any functional democracy. For example, we have now isolated two variables that we need to control, either by stimulating them, or by attenuating them.
The first variable is the flow of people. We see this playing out in South Africa at present. The internal movement of people used to be controlled by a policy that was rejected as a violation of human rights. It was called influx control, and it lay at the heart of the armed struggle for liberation, so it has been rejected, but it has not been replaced. The population has almost trebled in the last four decades, so that means uncontrolled internal migration from rural areas to cities. This has overwhelmed infrastructure, and water supply and sanitation services have lagged behind, creating a new form of national security crisis.
The second variable is the flow of capital, needed to create jobs to bring about social stability in a fluid population driven by migration stimuli. Capital is increasingly unwilling to flow into areas that are being overwhelmed by internal migration that is outstripping water supply and sanitation services.
In this simplistic model we can start to see that national security is dependent on water security, because social stability and economic wellbeing is directly correlated to the flow of people with skills and capital.
Understanding water as a national security risk is the key to policy reform needed to create enabling conditions for humans to flourish. Capital always flows to places where humans flourish. Policy needs to be aligned to this simple fact.
