How to avoid Africa's next water war
In 2023, Gen. Michael Langley, commander of U.S. Africa Command, warned that African countries face new destabilizing challenges, including 'climate change [that] is increasing desertification.'
One year earlier, Morocco, a close U.S. ally on the northwestern edge of the Sahara Desert, had already started taking bold steps to get ahead of the negative effects of climate change. In particular, it began building a series of dams to better manage its increasingly precarious water resources.
Scheduled for completion between 2026 and 2029, the dams will lessen the impact of more frequent and more violent floods, and they will allow Morocco to adapt to longer and more acute droughts. However, while the dams proactively mitigate the risks climate change poses to Morocco's domestic stability, they are catalysts for broader regional destabilization.
One of the dams, and its projected 35 billion cubic feet reservoir, is only 19 miles from Morocco's border with Algeria. The watershed filling the reservoir flows southeasterly, not further into Morocco but away from it and across the border into nearby Algeria.
While the dam will safeguard Moroccan communities' water supplies, it will cut off water for more than 300,000 Algerians just on the other side of the border.
Waters from the Oued Guir and the Oued Zousfana Rivers flow east out of Morocco's craggy Atlas Mountains and form the transboundary Oued Saoura watershed. The Saoura watershed is the primary water source for Algeria's Bechar and Tindouf provinces.
Combined, these two semi-arid provinces are bigger than the United Kingdom or Italy. Bechar and Tindouf depend on Saoura water for drinking, agriculture and industry.
Bechar, an Algerian city only 37 miles from the Moroccan border, is not some scrappy Saharan outpost, but a well-developed regional hub.
The eponymous seasonal Oued Bechar flows through town, its banks brimming with palm trees. A brand new university with faculties in medicine, biology, physics, political science and other disciplines caters to 15,000 students. Fountains burble and splash in shaded campus courtyards. There is a state-of-the-art oncology hospital.
Nearly all (98 percent) of Bechar's 35,000 households have running water. They also all have electricity, gas and internet access. Morocco's dams blocking the Saoura watershed threaten all of this.
In April, the University of Bechar hosted a conference on water resource management and equitable usage. Water resource specialists and geopolitical experts from other Algerian universities and around the world presented studies about the calamitous effects that Morocco's dams will have on Algerian communities and case studies of other successfully resolved cross-border water crises.
The burgeoning dam dispute between Morocco and Algeria is hardly unique: Climate change is exacerbating water conflicts around the world.
In many instances, like disputes about water usage on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers between Turkey and Iraq, or between Ethiopia and Egypt on the Nile, or more recently between India and Pakistan on the Indus River, opposing parties pursue a negotiated solution for equitable cross-border water sharing.
Negotiations are typically protracted, taking years, and they are often fraught, but guided by the United Nations' 1992 Water Convention, which obliges countries with cross-border water resources to 'use transboundary waters in a reasonable and equitable way,' negotiations aim at a mutually acceptable compromise.
Algeria and Morocco are a long way from any compromise.
Morocco is unilaterally pursuing a water resource management strategy that will negatively impact Algeria, accelerate desertification in the Sahara and potentially internally displace hundreds of thousands of Algerians. But because there are no diplomatic ties between Algeria and Morocco, there are no formal channels to negotiate equitable transboundary water usage.
Bechar, however, is not just home to a palm-lined river, a shiny cancer center and a university bustling with students. It is also home to Algeria's 3rd Military Region. The military base stretches for miles on the city's southwestern side, including an airfield, a hospital, barracks, a school and even a playground and a pool.
In May, Algeria's Army chief of staff, the country's highest-ranked uniformed officer, oversaw a live fire military exercise with 3rd Military Region forces, showcasing tanks, drones, mobile rocket systems, fighter jets, attack helicopters, shoulder-launched missiles and a mock ground assault. All within 30 miles of the Moroccan border and 60 miles from Morocco's dams.
With a 2025 defense budget estimated to be $25 billion, Algeria has the largest defense budget in Africa and almost double that of Morocco.
For Algeria, the dams' disruption of the Saoura watershed is a violation of Algeria's sovereignty. Langley, who just visited Morocco in May at the conclusion of the U.S. African Lion joint military exercise, is no doubt correct: Countries need to take steps to counter climate change's destabilizing effects.
But countries also need to ensure that the preventative measures they take accommodate broader contexts so that they do not become drivers of the very instability that they are trying to counter. This is the case of Morocco's dams: They are solving for potential instability in Morocco while simultaneously increasing its likelihood in Algeria.
The U.S. has exceptionally good relations with Morocco. Morocco is a major non-NATO ally, the highest ally status a country can have with the U.S. outside the NATO framework. It is one of only four Arab countries to have a free trade agreement with the U.S. and is a signatory to the Abraham Accords, normalizing relations with Israel.
The U.S. should use its considerable influence with Morocco to encourage it to reach an agreement with Algeria for the cooperative and equitable management of their shared transboundary water resources under the U.N. Water Convention, lest Algeria feels compelled to secure its national interest and its citizens' wellbeing through other means.
Geoff D. Porter, Ph.D., is the president of North Africa Risk Consulting, a nonresident fellow at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, and a professor at Fordham University.
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