Water Wars

As rivers shrink and populations grow, the fight over who gets the water is heating up. Most big rivers cross borders, so one country's dam is another country's drought.

The Nile runs through 11 countries. When Ethiopia built the giant Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam upstream, it sparked a bitter standoff with Egypt and Sudan, who fear losing the flow they depend on.

India and Pakistan divided the Indus River system under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, but the arrangement has sharply deteriorated: after the 2025 Pahalgam attack, India said it was holding the treaty in abeyance while Pakistan rejected that move. The water-sharing dispute now sits on top of both drought stress and wider conflict.

The Mekong flows through six countries before reaching the sea. China has built a string of dams near its source, and the countries downstream blame them for unusually low water and missing fish in the dry season.