"An elderly woman is given water in the Turkana region of Kenya." (September 2009)--(Credits)

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We see the two degree target exposes over 100 countries to massive suffering and devastation...Ten billion dollars under the current scenarios will not buy the poor of developing countries coffins, let alone address the serious problems that this challenge is causing." (Sudan UN Ambassador Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, speaking at COP15 on behalf of 77 developing countries)

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Henceforth, I'll always remember what my friend Alexis Sinduhije, now a Burundian opposition leader, told me several years ago as I was bemoaning the misery in war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo during what has since been dubbed as Africa's World War. This is just the beginning, Sinduhije told me, the next war in the Great Lakes region will be about water!

At the time, I didn't take Sinduhidje seriously. But since then, however, Sinduhije's words have proved to be prophetic.

The recent Fish War in the DRC where conflicts over halieutic [fishing] resources in two fish ponds in Dongo, in the northwestern Equateur Province of the DRC, have resulted in ethnic cleansing with more than 70,000 refugees in Congo-Brazzaville and the surrounding areas, tends to prove Sinduhije's prophecythough with its dense hydrographic grid still intact, the DRC would be the last country where two neighboring communities would fight over fish.

In 2007, Frédéric Lassere, a professor at Laval University (Quebec) and an expert in the geopolitics of blue gold (water), in a seminal article, was arguably the first scientist to offer a model plotting the synergetic correlation between water scarcity and what he called hydraulic conflicts or water wars:

In the current context of changing climatic conditions and growing food needs, the pressure on hydraulic resources is sharply increasing. Water has become a major political issue and both the control and sharing of water, are now potential sources of conflicts. These can be inter-state conflicts or low-intensity internal ones, but in both cases, hydraulic conflicts often only exacerbate existing tensions between states or communities, and they could entail real water wars' if pushed to the extreme. The potential of conflict increases with the swiftness of the hydraulic rupture, which causes true water scarcity. However, societies appear more or less sensitive to this rupture, depending on their capacity of social adaptation.'

Frédéric Lasserre treats this issue globally. But in an expanded version of his 2007 article, Lasserre identifies the following cases of hydraulic conflicts exacerbating ethnic conflicts in the African Great Lakes region:

1) April 1999/February 2001: in Kenya, clashes between nomadic farmers and cattle raisers over access to water (around the Tana River) cause more than 100 victims;

2) September 2004: In the southern Angolan province of Huila, conflicts over access to water lead to interethnic conflagration in which scores of people are killed;

3) February July 2005: the death toll at flashpoints in various parts of Kenya over access to water resources (particularly around Tana River) rose to several dozen killed.

In October, the Paris-based publisher Editions Delavilla released Frédéric Lasserre's Les Guerres de l'eau [Water Wars] that offers his comprehensive theory on the modeling of these possible hydraulic wars of the 21^st century.

In the specific case of Africa, a recent study by American scientists entitled Warming increases the risk of civil war in Africa, also based on computer modeling, that coldly sums up in its abstract and in no uncertain terms the catastrophe about to befall Africa:

We find strong historical linkages between civil war and temperature in Africa, with warmer years leading to significant increases in the likelihood of war. When combined with climate model projections of future temperature trends, this historical response to temperature suggests a roughly 54% increase in armed conflict incidence by 2030, or an additional 393,000 battle deaths if future wars are as deadly as recent wars. Our results suggest an urgent need to reform African governments' and foreign aid donors' policies to deal with rising temperatures.

To turn back to Kenya, the Tana River Dam, Kenya's largest hydro-electric dam, has been shut down because of low water levels due to severe drought, which increases the likelihood of intercommunal violence in the area over dwindling water resources.

In a piece filed last September from Lokori in Kenya and titled Lush Land Dries Up, Withering Kenya's Hopes that contained dramatic photos, New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman reported: A devastating drought is sweeping across Kenya, killing livestock, crops and children. It is stirring up tensions in the ramshackle slums where the water taps have run dry, and spawning ethnic conflict in the hinterland as communities fight over the last remaining pieces of fertile grazing land.

In the northern border of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the drying of Lake Chad has been having a direct violent effect since the 1970s, with roving bands of Chadian and Sudanese cattle raisers, in search of grazing lands, have settled into villages after chasing away their inhabitants. Incidentally, some argue that the Darfur war is a water war.

Ambassador Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping was right: Gordon Brown's annual $10 billion proposal for poorer countries is a joke and Africa, which has never contributed to the unfolding climate catastrophe, won't have enough coffins for its climate change related dead.