On June 1, the Biden-Harris Administration released the White House Action Plan on Global Water Security, citing water’s role in national security as a primary motivation for its approach.
In remarks delivered from the Indian Treaty Room of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Vice President Kamala Harris argued that “many of our most fundamental security interests depend on water security,” which requires the United States to “elevate water security as an international priority.” She also reflected on the need to address pressing water security issues domestically, including from lead contamination, poor infrastructure, and drought.
The Vice President’s remarks were preceded by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, Millennium Challenge Corporation CEO Alice Albright, and USAID Administrator Samantha Power, illustrating the White House’s vision for a whole-of-government approach to water security. Curiously, there was no high-level State Department representative present, although diplomacy was called out as an integral component of the strategy.
The action plan arrives as a number of international transboundary disputes over water fester. Tensions between Egypt and Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Nile have been high for well over a decade, with Egyptian President al-Sisi as recently as last week calling the dam an existential issue for his country and people. Notably, over the last decade both Egypt and Ethiopia have struggled with bouts of political instability, a situation with enormous implications for U.S. national security interests. Similarly, transboundary water disputes exist between nations on the Jordan, Indus, Amu Darya, Tigris-Euphrates, and Mekong Rivers, all with security implications.
The plan also highlights the threat that drought poses to human and national security. Domestically, large swaths of the southwestern United States are already experiencing extreme or exceptional drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, with increasing pressures on agriculture, health, infrastructure, and labor. Many countries worldwide–on every continent except Antarctica–are experiencing similarly punishing droughts, with implications for political stability, migration, and suffering. Chile, for example, is suffering from an acute water crisis, exacerbated by a 13-year megadrought, that some experts fear will trigger political unrest in the nation.
(For analysis of water security in the Middle East and North Africa, see this April 2021 article by Marcus King and Rianna Lehane.)
The global water security action plan has three pillars: 1) Advancing U.S. leadership on water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) issues without increasing greenhouse gas emissions; 2) Promote sustainable water management, particularly through cooperative water agreements, technology sharing, and capacity building; and 3) Mobilizing multilateral action on water security, such as through the G7, G20, and the UN. The plan also specifies that relevant science agencies and the intelligence community “will be engaged during all stages of policymaking, diplomacy, and programming,” which is a notable and welcome declaration.
Both the action plan and Vice President Harris’s statement acknowledged the strong role that climate change plays in water insecurity worldwide. Both also underscored the importance of addressing non-climate stressors such as population growth, urbanization, poor governance, and ecological degradation.
The plan is to be operationalized in the Congressionally-mandated U.S. Global Water Strategy, which is prepared by the State Department and USAID every five years. As the last such strategy was produced in 2017, the next iteration is due to Congress this year.
Dr. Rod Schoonover is Head of the Ecological Security Program at the Converging Risks Lab, an institute of the Council on Strategic Risks, and served for a decade in the U.S. intelligence community.