Unraveling transboundary water security in the arid Americas

ABSTRACT

Transboundary waters are characterized by diverse and complex socio-politico-economic obstacles to effective water management. We examine five distinct cases in the arid Americas – in locations from the US–Mexico border to the Andes mountains – employing water security as a conceptual prism to unravel the multiple and varied attributes of transboundary water challenges. We describe how borders complicate water security in arid regions and explore how institutional arrangements and practices – within and across jurisdictions – respond to these challenges. We find that institutional capacity is needed on multiple levels for effective water management, and institutions must be responsive and flexible to change.

KEYWORDS:

• Arid regions
• climate
• institutions
• transboundary
• water security
• the Americas

Acknowledgments

The maps in this manuscript were designed by Adriana Zuniga-Teran. The authors thank Elma Montaña for reviewing a portion of this manuscript. We also thank our anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions. This work was undertaken as part of the International Water Security Network, a project funded by Lloyd’s Register Foundation, a charitable foundation helping protect life and property by supporting engineering-related education, public engagement and the application of research. We further acknowledge the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research, for Project SGP-CRA005, supported by US National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant No. GEO-1138881. The paper also benefited from support from the Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation, in Tucson, Arizona.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplementary data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/02508060.2018.1541583

Notes

1. See Conca (2005), Young (1989), and Hayton and Utton (1989), whose seminal model groundwater treaty recognized what they called ‘critical transboundary resource management areas’.

2. Among the earliest examples of such arrangements are the Colorado and Rio Grande (1944), Danube (1948), Indus (1960), Rhine (1963) and Senegal (1963) river basins, all of which created basin commissions or authorities, and some of which enacted treaties.

3. The case-study analysis relies on knowledge and experience developed through years of fieldwork and research projects conducted by the co-authors in these locations. Authors are active participants (or close affiliates) in two water-security networks operating in the Americas: the International Water Security Network, which is headquartered in Bristol, UK, and AQUASEC, the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research centre of excellence for water security in the Americas. Both were established in the early 2010s to study place-based water-security conditions and foster enhancements through science–policy dialogues.

4. Throughout this essay, we use the term ‘arid’ to refer generally to water-scarce areas. This includes regions that are semiarid (200–500 mm precipitation per year), to arid (25–200 mm), to hyperarid (less than 25 mm), according to the classic definition by Grove (1977).

5. These include the heated discussion over a border wall, immigration, narcotrafficking, and free trade – all of which have become more prominent since 2016.

6. The North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994.

7. Safe yield is defined in Arizona as ‘a groundwater management goal which attempts to achieve and thereafter maintain a long-term balance between the annual amount of groundwater withdrawn in an active management area and the annual amount of natural and artificial recharge in the active management area’ (A.R.S. §45–561).

8. The 1944 Water Treaty (Utilization of Waters of the Colorado and Tijuana Rivers and of the Rio Grande) allocated 1850 million cubic metres of the Colorado River’s flow to Mexico, addressed allocations on the Rio Grande and Tijuana Rivers, and emphasized the need to prioritize transboundary sanitation issues. ‘Minutes’ are added to the treaty for incremental adjustments.

9. IBWC’s Mexican analogue is CILA, the Comisión Internacional de Límites y Agua; thus, both countries have representatives in this binational institution.

10. The only formal agreement that addresses groundwater is IBWC’s Minute 242, of 1973, which limits groundwater extraction in a small area near San Luis, AZ.

11. In 2006, the US Congress passed the Transboundary Aquifer Assessment Act (Public Law 109–448), authorizing the US Geological Survey, in partnership with federally recognized, public-university-based water-resources research centres in US border states, to cooperate with Mexico on this effort.

12. The first TAAP report, conducted on the San Pedro aquifer, the Binational Study of the Transboundary San Pedro Aquifer (Callegary et al., 2016), includes a binational database, technical analysis and binational maps, printed in both English and Spanish. The San Pedro aquifer is also shared between Arizona and Sonora, and is directly east of the Santa Cruz.

13. In the US and in Mexico, the largest subnational administrative units are called states; in Ecuador and Argentina, they are provinces; in Peru, they are departments. Chile has 15 large regions, which are divided into 54 provinces.

14. These may include urban expansion, changing climate and hydrologic regimes, invasive species, and shifting socio-political-economic processes.

15. Argentinean Institute of Nivology, Glaciology and Environmental Sciences.

16. The suit is highly ironic since it plays into the hands of the environmentalists’ adversaries, the mining companies.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research [SGP-CRA005];Lloyd's Register Foundation [CE-12-1051/CE-12-0801];National Science Foundation [GEO-1138881];Udall Foundation [MKU07066];