That the fields around al-Jafr in southern Jordan are often desiccated is a source of frustration and deprivation for locals. That they can sometimes hear the gurgle of water in pipelines passing along the periphery of their lands is cause for outright fury.
Since 2013, when the Jordanian government inaugurated the Disi Water Conveyance Project to pipe groundwater from the country’s rural far south to its populous northern cities, communities such as al-Jafr have been up in arms over what they see as the pilfering of their resources. The more compromised that their own wells have become—many only reaching water at more than half a mile down—the more that anger has grown.
The area has seen frequent, sometimes fiery demonstrations. On at least 300 occasions, the pipeline has been attacked or in some way sabotaged, according to project security personnel, who have had to recalibrate from terror threats to irate locals. As one gendarme put it to me back in 2019, “they think Amman is stealing their water, and they’re not happy about it. We fear many more problems in the future.”
Al-Jafr’s grievances and plight are representative of a growing global trend. Urban water demand is surging, while the supplies that many cities have historically drawn upon are very much not. Fearful of metropolises running dry but unwilling or unable to address the root causes of their troubles, many authorities have hit upon a similar strategy: annex more water from the countryside, the consequences for peace and stability be damned.
Cities have a long history of appropriating rural water, but the rate of capture appears to have picked up significantly this century. In just the past five years, more than a dozen countries, including Senegal and India, have announced or assembled long distance pipelines to provide for their thirsty megacities. China is nearing completion of its massive South-North Water Transfer Project, which will bring at least half a Nile’s worth of water annually from the Yangtze River and others to Beijing, Tianjin, and other northern urban areas. Iran has built infrastructure to transport water from agriculturally rich provinces to parched, largely urban ones.
Across the world, at least 400 million people in roughly 70 urban areas annually consume tens of billions of cubic meters of water that is cumulatively transported from tens of thousands of kilometers away. This water grab is partly a function of soaring urbanization. Cities have added around 1.8 billion residents since 2000, and they’re projected to add 2.5 billion more by 2050. With those increases naturally comes greater thirst, much of it centered in some of the world’s hottest, driest, and most haphazardly planned places, especially in South Asia.
It’s also partly the result of snowballing climate and environmental stresses. Many of the ground and surface water resources on which cities have historically depended have either been depleted by severe overpumping, emptied by increasingly erratic rainfall, or both. Vital reservoirs from Bogotá to Istanbul are now routinely running dry, fueling a desperate hunt for more dependable water sources.
Given these immense demands, much of this redistributive infrastructure may seem unavoidable. But the growing violence that it’s leaving in its wake is not. It’s the result of shoddy governance.
Many of these schemes tap water from agrarian areas that are also reeling from drought and don’t feel that they have the water to spare. Consequently, projects designed to pipe away scarce yet critical resources go down like lead balloons, including in places that, in times of more consistent weather patterns, were relatively unbothered by urban transfers.
In Nepal, for instance, where the government recently completed a decades-long project to channel water from the Himalayas to Kathmandu, mountain communities are livid over what they see as state-sanctioned water theft. Under the terms of an agreement struck to assuage local opposition in the run-up to the project’s 2021 opening, officials pledged to leave sufficient water for farmers, according to both villagers and the mayor of Melamchi Bazar, a Himalayan valley town.
Thanks to Kathmandu’s insatiable needs, however, that’s not what’s happened. The redirected rivers have become feeble versions of their once bountiful selves, with much of their flow now fed through tunnels to thirsty millions in the city.
“They have left us with nothing,” said farmer Bharat Bahadur Karki in the upstream Helambu municipality. “Not even enough to water a [rice] paddy.”
Karki, like many other struggling farmers in his position, was consequently contemplating a move to Kathmandu at our time of meeting in 2023. The irony is grim: Moving to the city would further increase urban demand, intensifying the very problem that is contributing to untenable rural living. The state’s stock solution—tapping more rural water—only feeds the unhappy cycle.
These schemes are not playing out in a political vacuum. The rural areas losing their water tend to be the very same ones that are nursing deep, generally reasonable anti-state grievances. Their communities almost invariably have worse infrastructure, worse essential services, and much higher poverty rates than those of urban areas.
Moreover, water transfer schemes can appear to be designed to enrich their architects or service niche constituencies, rather than actually providing for urbanites. Like all massive infrastructure projects, they can be lucrative moneymaking opportunities. This has occurred in Pakistan, where rural water has been redirected to service military-affiliated agribusiness, and Iran, where firms affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have amassed fortunes building water projects that hydrologists say have no business being built in a climate-battered country.
In this context, taking water from the rural poor is just one blow too many. It should be no surprise that discontent, sabotage, and violence are flourishing as a result.
Although this dynamic is predominantly playing out across rapidly urbanizing and infrastructurally challenged parts of the world—that is, the global south—it is beginning to reappear in the West. Despite the fact that the West built out most of its water systems long ago, the effect is similarly destabilizing.
In Roccella, a village in central Sicily, a vegetable farmer who gave his name only as Marco told me a familiar story last year. Ever since the construction of a shiny new pumping station, which extracts local groundwater and pipes it to thirsty coastal cities, his well has yielded a fraction of its former bounty. Naturally, he’s furious.
“We used to get water every day. Now we don’t, and it’s because of them,” he said. “How is that meant to make us feel?”
In mountainous central Greece, regional rivers are increasingly flowing everywhere but to the rural communities that once drew from them. The government is redirecting some water up to 200 miles away to Athens, which has grown beyond the capacity of its reservoirs. Others are sent to the plains of Thessaly. There, farming communities around Karditsa claim that officials from the city of Larissa tried to divert canals to provide for their under-watered residents, only for the farmers to stifle those attempts by instituting roving patrols.
That kind of resistance may become rarer in richer parts of the world. With fewer people left to complain in depopulating rural Europe, some water transfers are less contentious than they previously might have been.
At the same time, ambitions for redistributive megaprojects are growing. There’s talk of the western United States one day seeking water from east of the Rocky Mountains, and southern Europe could one day seek it from north of the Alps. Superficially, at least, these arrangements appear to make mutual sense. As climate change makes wet places wetter and dry places drier, one region’s megaflood could become another’s drought-defying irrigation.
But our rural-urban divides have become seismic. It’s hard to see how those lofty, expensive ambitions could ever be fulfilled to everyone’s satisfaction in democratic societies, even if the technical challenges could be overcome.
Still, as the gulf between urban water supply and demand widens, transfers are likely to become even more of a fixture of the future. That need not be a wholly bad thing.
There’s plenty that could be done to secure the buy-in of those relinquishing their water, perhaps in the form of water-for-services agreements. Much could be done to temper the effects of the most contested transfer schemes, which are often opposed for their outright greed rather than for their very existence. From Austin to Amman, urban authorities would have less cause to intrude on rural water resources if they were to prioritize the plugging of leaky pipes and other efficiency measures.
But current trends bode ill for a change of tack. States appear to be less interested than ever in the fortunes of their rural citizens, especially as cities absorb a greater share of national populations—and GDP. Almost 70 percent of the world is projected to live in urban areas by 2050, whereas agriculture, the great rural water consumer, accounts for a shrinking percentage of most countries’ economies.
Authorities are increasingly panicked by their swelling urban populations, stoking a desperation that is seldom conducive to thoughtful action. Poor urban planning continues to scuttle sustainable water solutions. By tarmacking over aquifer recharge areas and sprawling into surrounding woodland, for instance, urban authorities are further compromising local supply, just as appetites surge.
Cities’ worsening water woes are infuriating residents, many of whom had grown used to superior services and who haven’t been shy about making their displeasure felt, including in Tehran and Nairobi.
As a result, officials bent on political survival are frantically casting around for more water supply. Distant, politically unconnected constituencies in the countryside happen to be the most convenient targets. But they won’t go dry without a fight.
