Water at the Crossroads

September 25, 2025

By Adam Musa

Tranquility News Correspondent, North America

Boston, Massachusetts – Before dawn in northern Kenya, a line of women forms at the village’s only working borehole. Plastic jerry cans clatter against the dust as they wait, children trailing behind with smaller containers. By sunrise, the heat is already punishing, and the well has slowed to a trickle.

For these women, the ritual is routine: hours lost each day in pursuit of water that is never quite enough. For policymakers meeting thousands of miles away in Stockholm, it is an abstraction made real — a reminder of how scarcity fuels instability, and how instability can spark conflict.

Over three years — 2023, 2024, and 2025 — World Water Week in Sweden has wrestled with this reality. What began as a call for innovation became a plea for cooperation, and finally, an urgent reckoning with water as both a source of conflict and a pathway to peace.

Seeds of Change

The story opened in 2023 under the banner “Seeds of Change: Innovative Solutions for a Water-Wise World.” The mood was hopeful, even defiant. “This is our week to build a common agenda of change — and to be its agents,” declared Karin Gardes of the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI).

Innovation was framed less as technology than as values. Fijian scientist Milika Sobey described how Indigenous stewardship of marine areas restored both fish stocks and trust. “People thrive on respect, responsibility, reciprocity, and relationships,” she reminded delegates.

Others stressed the economics of inaction. Ninety percent of disasters are water-related, yet less than 4 percent of disaster funding goes to prevention. “Inaction has a cost; resilience is the smarter investment,” said Sergio Campos of the Inter-American Development Bank.

The starkest warning came from Italian hydrologist Professor Andrea Reinaldo, that year’s World Water Prize Laureate. “Climate is changing faster than our records can guide us,” he told the Tranquility News. “We cannot talk about predictions anymore — we must talk about scenarios.” Linking water to migration, inequality, and security, he insisted: “War is not inevitable. Cooperation is.”

The seeds had been planted.

Bridging Borders

In 2024, optimism gave way to urgency. Swedish photojournalist Paul Hansen stunned the opening audience with images of bombed-out dams in Afghanistan, hijacked wells in Sudan, and flooded neighborhoods in Bangladesh. “Water is a source of life, but also a source of violence and death,” he said, and the room fell silent.

The theme, “Bridging Borders: Water for a Peaceful and Sustainable Future,” underscored that tension. Panels debated whether shared waters inflame conflict or build trust. “Shared waters more often lead to cooperation than conflict,” argued Dan Smith of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Examples of progress offered hope. Finland’s Water Way Strategy aligned ministries under a single water-security vision. In South Africa, Deputy Minister David Mahlobo reflected on water’s transformation from a weapon of apartheid to a constitutional right.

Voices long excluded demanded recognition. Gomeroi elder Phil Duncan called Indigenous knowledge “the missing ingredient.” Sámi youth leader Aana Edmondson urged: “Listen. Respect. Act.” From Canada, Blackfoot Youth Water Council’s Disa Crow Chief issued a generational challenge: “Youth are not just the future — they are the present. We deserve a seat at every table.”

If 2023 was about planting seeds, 2024 was about watering them with trust.

 Water and Peace

By 2025, attention turned to fragile states, where water scarcity collides with weak institutions, displacement, and violence.

In a World Bank–hosted session staged like a global talk show, host Haj Kubi put it bluntly: “Water can spark conflict or suffer as its casualty, yet when managed collaboratively, it offers immense potential to promote peace.”

World Bank specialist Victor Vasquez outlined a four-pillar strategy: prevention, engagement during conflict, rebuilding after war, and managing cross-border spillovers. His colleague Anders Jägers pointed to Africa, where 90 percent of water lies in shared basins. One rare case of cooperation, he noted, was the fragile but hopeful Senegal–Mauritania Aquifer Basin.

On the ground, progress is slow and fragile. In the Horn of Africa, even the placement of a borehole can ignite violence if not carefully negotiated. Projects now integrate conflict-mapping, third-party monitoring, and community norms alongside policy. “Without community engagement, projects risk a cycle of ‘build, disrepair, rehabilitate,’” Vasquez warned.

The refrain was clear: inclusion and flexibility.

The Arc of Three Years

From 2023 to 2025, World Water Week traced a deliberate arc. Planting seeds of innovation, nurturing cooperation across borders, and positioning water as a cornerstone of peace.

The challenges remain daunting: droughts deepen, floods worsen, migration accelerates. But the conversation has shifted — from what is broken to how it might be repaired, together.

Back in that Kenyan village, women still queue at dawn. But in Stockholm, their daily struggle now anchors a global conversation about cooperation and peace. As Professor Reinaldo said in 2023: “Distributive justice in water is not the whole answer — but it is a large part of building a fairer, more stable world.”

The images of women at the well, of rivers rerouted in war, of fragile aquifers managed across borders, all point to the same truth: water is no longer just a resource. It is the stage on which humanity’s next chapter will be written.