Conflict on EARTH Magazine

November 10, 1934: Arizona declares war against California at Parker Dam

Wed, 03 Dec 2014 14:01:44 -0500

From above, tiny green irrigation circles draw a narrow buffer along the 2,300-kilometer course of the Colorado River like the brush strokes of a zoomed-in pointillist painting. These vibrant green dots stand out against the buff and ochre hues of the desert palette, a testament to the river’s life-giving waters. Less obvious are the 6.4 billion cubic meters of water that flow, or are pumped, more than 390 kilometers from the Colorado’s gorge through tunnels and canals, up and down hills, to the agricultural and population centers of Southern California each year, and the additional 3.4 billion cubic meters that gurgle toward Phoenix and central Arizona annually.

Caspian Sea: Negotiation Support System

Tue, 15 Oct 2013 10:15:40 -0400

A digitized map of the Caspian Sea used in the Negotiation Support System showing the locations of proven oil and gas deposits (green). Courtesy of Kaveh Madani

Sample outputs (optimum nautical boundaries) created by the NSS follow the stipulation that either each portion of the sea is allotted to the country to which it is physically closest (left), or that each country receives an equal areal portion (i.e., 20 percent) of the sea (right). Courtesy of Kaveh Madani

To supplement their efforts at modeling the Caspian conflict using game theory and, potentially, to aid the five littoral countries as they continue to negotiate over how to govern and apportion the sea and its resources, Kaveh Madani, a civil engineer at the University of Central Florida, and his colleagues have developed a computer model dubbed the Caspian Sea Negotiation Support System (NSS).

Gaming the system in the Caspian Sea: Can game theory solve a decades-old dispute?

Tue, 15 Oct 2013 10:00:27 -0400

Kathleen Cantner, AGI

Water-rights disputes are never easy. Whether they are over pumping from aquifers shared among adjacent landowners, allocation of resources at the municipal, county or state level, or division of a river or lake shared between neighboring countries, there is an inevitable push and pull among stakeholders over who gets what and how much. In the end, resolutions tend to be compromises — often meted out by governing authorities — which, while not ideal from any one party’s standpoint, appeal to the desire of the group for stability over strife.

Rescuing geologic maps during a coup

Thu, 15 Aug 2013 08:44:17 -0400

courtesy of John F. (Jack) Shroder Jr.

The author shows a map of the geomorphology of northern Afghanistan to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and others at the University of Nebraska in Omaha in 2005. The author created the map in the summer of 1978, between the communist coup in May and his deportation from Kabul that fall. The map was an early “trafficability” type (including active sand dunes and shifting rivers, as well as active tectonics [rising anticlines and piercement salt domes]). Right after the coup, he says, he knew his days were numbered so he loaded his truck with food and headed out of Kabul in the north to field-check this map. When he ran out of supplies, he returned to Kabul, where Afghan communist officials found him and pressured him to turn over all his maps. However, his cook, Abdul Waheed, surreptitiously took the maps to the U.S. embassy — on his bicycle — and they were shipped back to the U.S. in a diplomatic pouch. This is one of the few maps to make it out. The author was house arrested after this for three months and was finally deported on a few hours’ notice, driven to the airport and put on a Lufthansa jet to Germany.

Voices: Climate change and civil conflict: New clues from El Nino

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 06:41:58 -0500

New research suggests that countries where the majority of the population lives in areas that become much warmer in El Niño years (red) are more likely to experience wars than countries with temperatures that are less affected (blue). Hsiang et al., courtesy of Nature

In 2007, 11 retired admirals and generals from the U.S. armed forces published a report arguing that global climate changes represented a major threat to global security. That same year, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon argued in a Washington Post op-ed that the ongoing Sudanese civil conflict was, in part, attributable to climatic changes. By combining new techniques from climate physics and econometrics, my colleagues and I have found evidence that there is some truth in these statements. Indeed, the global climate can influence the outbreak of civil wars.