Climate Change and Water Variability : Do Water Treaties Contribute to River Basin Resilience?
Climate-driven water variability is a natural phenomenon observed across river basins, but predicted to increase due to climate change. Environmental change of this kind may aggravate political tensions, especially in regions that are not equipped...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2016
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2016/10/26854164/climate-change-water-variability-water-treaties-contribute-river-basin-resilience http://hdl.handle.net/10986/25300 |
| Summary: | Climate-driven water variability is a
natural phenomenon observed across river basins, but
predicted to increase due to climate change. Environmental
change of this kind may aggravate political tensions,
especially in regions that are not equipped with an
appropriate institutional apparatus. This paper argues that
attempts to assess the ability of states to deal with
variability in the future rests with considering how river
basins with agreements have fared in the past. The paper
investigates whether basins governed by treaties witness
less tension (and by extension more cooperation) over shared
water in comparison with those basins not governed by
treaties, using the 1948-2008 country dyads event data from
the Basins at Risk project. The results provide evidence to
suggest that the presence of a treaty promotes cooperation.
Furthermore, the number of agreements between riparian
countries has a significant positive effect on cooperation,
which is robust across different specifications controlling
for a broad set of climatic, geographic, political, and
economic variables. |
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