The Coming Water Wars

Morning Comrades.

If, by the off-chance you are new to this substack, this is the 2nd and concluding part to an essay that was published on Monday, one which you can easily find on here. Importantly, much of what is written down here is based on the impressive work by Erald Kolasi and Jesse Damiani ( linked ) and the sources section of this paper here on MDPI

AI is often presented as if its primary inputs were algorithms, data and computational ingenuity, but computation has to occur somewhere. It requires enormous data centres, electricity generation, transmission infrastructure, semiconductor fabrication, steel, concrete and cooling systems. Kolasi has repeatedly emphasised this physical foundation, while the recent Kolasi-Damiani research seeks to quantify the full energy, emissions and water footprint of AI rather than isolating the narrow electricity consumption of data centres. This matters because the competition over AI is simultaneously becoming a competition over the physical resources required to construct and operate it.

The implications are already visible in the United States, where proposed data centres have generated local resistance in water-stressed areas and where communities are increasingly questioning why private technology corporations should receive access to public infrastructure at a time of resource constraint. Kolasi has described conflicts around data-centre development in Arizona and elsewhere, including projects cancelled following public opposition, while pointing to the secrecy surrounding corporate resource demands and the fact that evaporative cooling can remove substantial quantities of water from local systems. What appears initially as a dispute about a building is therefore actually a dispute over the allocation of a watershed.

The future conflict could be considerably sharper.

Imagine a drought-stricken region in which agricultural production is declining, municipal reservoirs are falling and groundwater tables are collapsing, while simultaneously a technology corporation proposes a massive data centre promising investment, employment and tax revenue. The corporation offers to finance infrastructure improvements and signs a long-term water contract. The government approves the project because it wants the capital, or bribes, you decide. Water prices rise and in the name of reason farmers are told to improve efficiency and households are encouraged to conserve. Meanwhile, the data centre receives guaranteed access because its contract was negotiated when water was cheaper. Nothing resembling a war has occurred, yet the political structure of a water war is already present: one social group has acquired privileged access to a declining common resource while another is required to absorb the scarcity.

The same logic could and already does operate internationally.

A wealthy country suffering water stress can finance infrastructure in a poorer neighbouring state in exchange for long-term access to agricultural production, groundwater, river flows or virtual water embedded in commodities, as, for example, between Israel and Jordan. Sovereign debt can become connected to infrastructure concessions and international development institutions can encourage water-market reforms in the name of efficiency. Corporations can purchase land containing strategic aquifers and so wealthier states can effectively outsource their water consumption by importing water-intensive crops, thereby importing the labour and ecological costs associated with water depletion elsewhere. The OECD already emphasises the importance of “virtual water” because internationally traded goods contain enormous quantities of water embedded in their production. In such a world, a country can export enormous quantities of water without exporting a single litre in a tanker.

This is imperialism adapted to hydrology.

The historical pattern should therefore concern us, to put it mildly. Capital has repeatedly responded to ecological limits not by abandoning accumulation but by reorganising ownership around scarcity, most often violently. When something becomes scarce, its price rises. Rather than constraining accumulation, scarcity has historically tended to reorganise it. As the value of a resource increases, so too does the value of the legal rights governing access to it, creating powerful incentives for capital to consolidate ownership and secure long-term control over increasingly strategic assets. Where this process encounters resistance from populations threatened by dispossession, the state frequently intervenes, not as a neutral arbiter between competing interests, but as the institution responsible for constructing and enforcing the legal, political and administrative frameworks through which accumulation can continue. The result is what David Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession helps us recognise: scarcity does not necessarily constrain accumulation; under particular institutional conditions, scarcity can become the basis for a new round of dispossession.

Water could become one of the largest arenas for this process in the twenty-first century, but there is an even darker possibility.

When water becomes strategically indispensable to economic production, the destruction or interruption of water infrastructure becomes an extraordinarily powerful weapon as we have seen in the latest US war against Iran. Modern cities are dependent upon treatment plants, pumping stations, reservoirs, desalination facilities, electricity grids and pipelines whose disruption can rapidly create humanitarian catastrophe. Recent conflicts have already demonstrated this vulnerability, with water infrastructure damaged or targeted in war zones, while contemporary reporting has documented the growing vulnerability of water systems to both military attacks and cyberattacks. In highly centralised systems, the distinction between attacking a military target and attacking the material conditions of civilian survival can become dangerously thin.

This produces a second meaning of water war: not the struggle to acquire water, but the use of water infrastructure to make populations ungovernable.

The logic is brutally simple in capitalist terms. The strategic importance of water infrastructure lies in the extraordinary degree to which modern societies depend upon complex and highly integrated technological systems whose disruption can rapidly undermine the conditions necessary for everyday life. Electricity failures can render water treatment facilities inoperative, while damage to treatment plants can eliminate access to safe drinking water altogether. The destruction of pipelines can leave entire urban populations dependent upon emergency distribution networks, just as the contamination of groundwater can devastate agricultural production across entire regions. Equally, the ability to control dams confers significant influence over both the timing and volume of downstream flows, while societies that rely heavily upon desalination become acutely vulnerable to any interruption in the facilities that sustain them. In each case, control over infrastructure becomes inseparable from control over the populations that depend upon it. In an increasingly water-stressed world, infrastructure becomes geography. The power to destroy infrastructure therefore becomes the power to reshape the territory itself.

Yet even this is not the most likely form of future water conflict. The most likely form will be slower, quieter and much more familiar: rationing, price increases, unequal access, land grabs, migration, agricultural collapse, political repression, corporate capture and the conversion of public water systems into financial assets.

The Iranian experience offers an indication of how quickly these pressures can converge. In 2026, severe water shortages pushed Tehran and other Iranian cities towards “day zero” conditions, with reservoirs critically depleted after years of drought. Water shortages contributed to public unrest alongside inflation, sanctions and broader economic pressures from the West, while tensions with Afghanistan over transboundary rivers added an international dimension. None of these factors can be reduced to climate change alone, nor can the resulting unrest be described simply as a “water war”. What it demonstrates instead is the political morphology through which water scarcity becomes dangerous: ecological depletion enters an economy already under stress, scarcity intensifies distributional conflict, distributional conflict produces political unrest, and geopolitical tensions provide states with an external enemy onto which domestic crisis can be projected.

The danger is that governments will respond to systemic ecological failure by militarising rather than democratising resource allocation, history tells us this much. Water shortages produce migration; migration produces border politics; border politics produces nationalism; nationalism demands security; security legitimises exceptional state powers; exceptional powers protect infrastructure and property; and the resulting political order treats those excluded from water as a security problem rather than as citizens whose material rights have been violated. That should sound eerily familiar to all of living in the West already.

At this point the water war becomes inseparable from the politics of dispossession.

The phrase “water war” can therefore conceal an important ideological question. Who is supposedly fighting whom? The conventional story imagines states fighting states, but the deeper conflict may well be between different social classes, regions and forms of production. The consequences of water scarcity are never experienced equally because access to resources, infrastructure and capital profoundly shapes the capacity of different social actors to adapt to ecological disruption.

A corporation confronted with prolonged drought possesses financial, technological and geographical flexibility that is simply unavailable to an impoverished household, while a wealthy city can often mobilise the capital necessary to secure new infrastructure in ways that remain beyond the reach of agricultural communities already operating under increasingly precarious conditions. Multinational firms can shift production between regions, financial institutions can protect themselves through various forms of hedging and investment, and affluent households can insulate themselves through private storage systems or alternative sources of supply. Those without access to such resources, i.e., the vast majority of us, by contrast, remain directly exposed to the material consequences of scarcity, revealing that drought is never simply an environmental phenomenon but rather a crisis mediated through existing structures of wealth and power. Capital possesses mobility; human beings generally do not. When scarcity arrives, capital can move towards scarcity and profit from it. Labour generally remains trapped within it.

That is why the future of water cannot be understood merely as an environmental question but is, equally, a question of political economy. Water scarcity becomes socially destructive not because scarcity automatically produces violence but because capitalism determines whose scarcity matters and whose does not. A billionaire can experience water scarcity as a rising asset price whereas a farmer can experience it as crop failure. The same physical phenomenon therefore produces radically different social realities depending upon one’s position within the economic structure.

This is where the realiy of water becoming an increasingly tradable asset becomes particularly ominous. The financial market does not need to cause physical scarcity to profit from it; it only needs scarcity to become predictable enough to price. Once drought, groundwater depletion, reservoir levels and precipitation patterns become sufficiently measurable, they can be transformed into financial information. Once financial information exists, derivatives can be created and once derivatives exist, institutions can hedge, speculate and arbitrage. Once these markets deepen, the price of future scarcity begins feeding back into present decisions about land, infrastructure and investment.

The market therefore begins to anticipate the future and, through investment, helps construct it.

This is one reason water futures are politically different from ordinary commodity futures. Financialisation literature has warned that water markets can create new asset classes and expose essential resources to the temporal logic of financial trading. The institutional logic of finance has no intrinsic mechanism for recognising water as a condition of collective existence, as a financial contract can represent scarcity. It cannot represent the moral fact that a child must drink regardless of the market price. The future water war may therefore begin with something as apparently mundane as a futures contract.

The ideology writes itself: water is scarce, therefore it must be priced; because it is priced, those who cannot afford it must consume less; because they consume less, the market has become more efficient; because unrest follows, security must be strengthened; because security costs money, further privatisation is necessary; and because privatisation produces higher prices, those who cannot pay must be assisted through targeted welfare rather than universal provision. The common becomes a commodity, the commodity becomes an asset, the asset becomes a security concern and the security concern becomes an excuse for further political control.

This is how a water war can occur without a declaration of war.

The immediate future is therefore unlikely to be a single global conflict over water. It is much more likely to be a planetary accumulation of water conflicts: farmers against cities, households against utilities, communities against data centres, states against upstream states, rural populations against mining companies, indigenous communities against extractive industries, workers against privatised utilities, poor countries against richer countries, and populations against governments attempting to preserve economic growth under conditions in which the physical foundations of that growth are deteriorating.

The political manifestations of water scarcity are unlikely to follow a single trajectory because conflicts over access, allocation and control can be mediated through a wide range of institutional arrangements and social relations. In some cases, competing interests may continue to be negotiated through democratic processes or give rise to new forms of regional cooperation and resource sharing, while in others the same pressures may contribute to migration, intensify existing political instability or accelerate the militarisation of already fragile societies. Only a relatively small proportion of these disputes are likely to develop into conventional interstate wars, yet restricting the definition of a water war exclusively to overt military confrontation obscures the broader reality that struggles over water are already emerging across multiple political, economic and social arenas.

And here the work of Kolasi becomes particularly useful because his materialist analysis of capitalism points towards a conclusion that the dominant technological discourse consistently avoids: there is no digital escape from ecological limits. The machine does not transcend nature but it certainly metabolises nature.

Artificial intelligence does not represent an escape from the material constraints that have historically governed economic development, nor does it eliminate the problem of physical scarcity. Instead, it reorganises and redistributes competing claims over the finite resources upon which increasingly complex technological systems depend. The metaphor of the cloud has long encouraged the illusion that computation exists in an abstract and immaterial space, yet the reality is that digital technologies remain inseparable from the physical infrastructures that sustain them. Computation is fundamentally an industrial activity requiring enormous quantities of energy, water and raw materials, while data centres should be understood not as ethereal repositories of information but as factories whose products happen to be computational rather than mechanical. The more rapidly these infrastructures expand, the more directly technological accumulation will collide with water, energy and land constraints. Kolasi’s work on the physical foundations of capitalism therefore provides a useful bridge between ecological economics and the political economy of technological development.

The future water war will consequently be fought partly over the right to continue economic expansion itself.

This is why the current language of “water crisis” is inadequate. A crisis implies something temporary that can be resolved before normality resumes, but there may be no return to the hydrological conditions upon which twentieth-century economic development was constructed. The emerging reality is closer to a structural transformation in the relationship between society and the hydrological cycle. Recent scientific and policy literature increasingly stresses that scarcity must be understood through climate variability, groundwater depletion, ecosystem degradation and political management rather than through a simple calculation of litres available per person. The question is no longer simply whether there is enough water. It is whether existing systems of production and ownership are compatible with the water cycle that actually exists.

They are not.

The conclusion, however, should not be that water wars are inevitable. That conclusion would merely convert a political problem into a natural disaster and thereby reproduce the ideology that has brought us here. Water scarcity is physical, the social consequences of scarcity are political. There is nothing natural about deciding that a semiconductor factory deserves priority over a community’s drinking water, or that an investor’s water rights should be protected before a household’s access, or that a corporation should be permitted to extract groundwater because it possesses the legal property rights to do so. These are political choices.

The real struggle over water is therefore a struggle over whether scarcity will be administered through markets and property or through democratic planning and collective rights.

If water becomes another asset class, the likely consequence will not be the efficient disappearance of scarcity but it will be the financialisation of inequality.

The most disturbing prediction, then, is not that armies will soon march across deserts in search of rivers. It is that the first great water wars may look perfectly ordinary, and eventually, in the places where all of these pressures converge, they may look like war.

Water is becoming too valuable for capitalism simply to leave it outside the logic of capital, yet too fundamental to human survival for society to tolerate indefinitely the consequences of allowing capital to determine its distribution. That contradiction is likely to become one of the defining political conflicts of the coming decades. The question is therefore not whether water will become strategically important, it already has. Nor is it whether water will become financialised, that process has already begun, from water-rights markets to futures contracts and increasingly sophisticated attempts to price hydrological risk. The question is what happens when the physical scarcity predicted by climate science encounters the financial claims already being constructed around that scarcity. At that moment, the water war will cease to be a metaphor.

It will become the name for the struggle over whether the most basic condition of life belongs to those who can purchase it or to those who require it.

If the history of capitalism offers any warning, the system will initially attempt to solve this contradiction by turning the necessity of water into the scarcity value of water, and then by turning that scarcity value into an opportunity for accumulation. The alternative is not merely public ownership in the narrow bureaucratic sense. It is a much more radical proposition: that water, precisely because nobody can live without it, cannot legitimately belong to anyone in the way that capital owns an ordinary commodity. It must be governed as a common condition of collective life, democratically, materially and ecologically, according to the limits of the watersheds upon which human societies actually depend.

Otherwise the future may be perfectly predictable.

You know what to do.

Yours, warmly,

V.