In The News

The New York Times: “It’s a Slow Death”: The World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis

Shuaib Almosawa, Ben Hubbard and Troy Griggs September 20, 2017
Directors of UNICEF, WFP, and WHO visited Yemen in July and described the “world’s worst cholera outbreak in the midst of the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.” Since the start of the conflict when the Houthis overthrew the government and gained control of Sana’a in 2014, Yemen has slowly collapsed. Frequent bombings have contributed to the deaths of more than 10,000 civilians and crippled the...

BBC: Graphene-Based Sieve Turns Seawater Into Drinking Water

Paul Rincon April 4, 2017
More than 95 percent of earth’s water is saltwater in the oceans. A research team with the University of Manchester has created a sieve that may remove salt from seawater. Testing is underway and “The sought-after development could aid the millions of people without ready access to clean drinking water,” reports Paul Rincon for BBC News. Graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a...

The Diplomat: Will Central Asia Water Wars Derail China's Silk Road?

Nishtha Chugh March 31, 2017
China continues to expand influence with its modern version of the Silk Road, a “prodigiously bold economic ambition to connect with potentially 40 countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa,” reports Nishtha Chugh. “The vast economic corridors and infrastructural network, when fully functional, will potentially give China unprecedented access to 60 percent of the world’s population and a third of...

AL Jazeera: Puntland Teetering on the Edge of Famine

Ashley Hamer March 27, 2017
In Puntland, a semiautonomous region of Somalia, a drought has ravaged grazing land. People who raise livestock for a living must move increasingly far distances – sometimes hundreds of kilometers – to find suitable land for their animals. Yet relocation is not enough as the drought spreads through the country. Six years ago, a famine in Somalia killed 260,000 people. “Now, nearly 6.2 million...

Brookings: How the Syrian Refugee Crisis Affected Transboundary Freshwater

Steven Gorelick, Marc F. Muller and Jim Yoon February 27, 2017
Researchers from Stanford University have demonstrated that the massive flow of people into Jordan due to the Syrian civil war has resulted in an increased flow of water as well. The Yarmouk River, which begins in Syria and terminates at the Jordanian border, has experienced an “unexpected, rapid increase in flow” since 2013, reports Brookings. Upstream Syrian refugees abandoning irrigated...

Africa Faces Worst Drought in Half a Century

Bartholomäus Grill May 13, 2016
Drought is devastating some of Africa’s poorest countries, threatening water supplies, power generation and agriculture. Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Swaziland have declared states of emergency. But some nations, like Ethiopia, are in denial about the impact of the abnormal sea and air patterns known as El Niño and the continent’s inability to handle population growth. Ethiopia’s...

China’s Water Hegemony

Brahma Chellaney May 5, 2016
China released dammed water to ease drought conditions for countries in the lower Mekong River Basin: “for the downriver countries, the water release was a jarring reminder of not just China’s newfound power to control the flow of a life-sustaining resource, but also of their own reliance on Beijing’s goodwill and charity,” writes Brahma Chellaney for the Japan Times. Water that originates in...