Antoun el-Fata, "Akhbar al-Yawm" agency

The Water Crisis Narrative: Political Agenda or Reality?

Water scarcity will be politically driven, with water used as a strategic weapon

For some time now, various tools, both media-driven and specialized in environmental and climate affairs, have been actively engaged in shaping public perception. Through reports and studies that are more political than scientific, they are promoting the idea of an imminent global water crisis. This narrative is being advanced through complex strategies that blend selective facts with intentional messaging, all serving multiple underlying agendas.

A Mere Coincidence?
What stands out most in this campaign is the blatant underestimation of people’s intelligence. The assumption seems to be that audiences will passively accept any information without scrutiny.

Is it a mere coincidence that alarming reports on severe water shortages are being simultaneously circulated in countries across the far West, the far East, and everywhere in between, including Lebanon? And is it purely by chance that these narratives are being pushed in unison, despite the fact that rainfall and groundwater levels in some of these Western and Eastern nations have been categorized as “good” to “excellent” for the 2024–2025 season, compared to previous years? Why is the Lebanese public being treated as if they will believe anything?

No Imminent Catastrophe
Lebanon provides a striking example of this phenomenon. Since December of last year, certain actors have been insisting that the 2024–2025 season will suffer from severe rainfall shortages, justifying increased water rationing and higher utility fees. However, it does not take exceptional intelligence to recognize that it is impossible to predict an entire rainfall season in Lebanon as early as December. As a Mediterranean country, Lebanon experiences rainfall between October and April (approximately), making such premature forecasts unreliable.

Moreover, Lebanon’s winter weather patterns have not undergone any fundamental changes despite the ongoing discussions about climate change. Rainfall and groundwater levels have always fluctuated, some years are drier, others wetter, and some bring powerful storms with heavy precipitation and snow. There have even been cases where March or April compensated for a dry February, restoring the annual average. Given this natural variability, why the rush to declare an impending disaster?

Water as a Strategic Resource
Experts stress that in the coming years and decades, access to water sources, rivers, reservoirs, and dams, will become more critical than oil and gas. Future geopolitical conflicts may be driven by water resources, and global policies will increasingly be shaped by the control and distribution of water.

These experts argue that water scarcity will not necessarily be the result of climate change, as widely claimed, but rather a consequence of deliberate political decisions. Water will be weaponized by those in power, creating recurring droughts and shortages in certain regions while ensuring stability in others.

In the future, advanced technology and infrastructure may even be leveraged to redefine rivers, springs, and other water sources as de facto borders between nations, or even between regions within the same country.

A Manufactured Crisis
Against this backdrop, it becomes evident that the persistent efforts to instill fear of an imminent water crisis are rooted in political motives. Certain actors are working to manufacture long-term water shortages for strategic objectives, rather than responding to an actual environmental emergency. Even climate change itself, while a legitimate concern, has significant political and economic dimensions that go beyond environmental discourse.

Nature possesses a remarkable ability to regulate and restore balance over time. The greater concern lies in human actions, how natural resources are exploited, depleted, and manipulated to serve specific interests.

It is unfortunate that certain local media outlets are complicit in perpetuating this narrative, blindly echoing alarmist reports about water shortages. In doing so, they risk undermining their own credibility, drowning it, quite literally, in a "mere drop of water".