Foreword

Making decisions about water is not trivial. For one, it’s not purely a resource, where the invisible hand of the market might drive allocations. Because all life and most livelihoods and ecosystems depend on it, we insist that ethics be included in decision-making. Similarly, water’s place in aesthetics and faith traditions often elevates conversations into the emotional and even spiritual realms, well beyond what can be quantified. Finally, there are the vast uncertainties involved in understanding today’s hydrologic cycle—orders of magnitude in groundwater, for example—let alone tomorrow’s. Add international borders, and the complexities multiply. As occasional headlines remind us, relations across borders in the world’s 313 transboundary basins can be fraught. Just in the last several years, tensions have flared within the Indus, between India and Pakistan; the Nile, between Ethiopia and Egypt; and even within the Columbia, between the United States and Canada. Negotiations can be difficult in the best of times, but it is no wonder that it regularly takes years and even decades to come to terms over transboundary waters. In many basins, agreements remain elusive altogether.