Bruce Bisset: Start of water wars floating ashore

The migrant push into Europe is not so much about economics as it is survival. Photo / Jo Currie, World Vision

Europe's problem with migrants - more properly, refugees - flooding in from less-affluent countries is not some temporary imbalance that will eventually be resolved, but merely the start of a mass movement of populations affected primarily by water scarcity.

For as much as wars, religious extremism and ethnic repression may be major reasons why people decide to suddenly uproot themselves and risk everything on one-way journeys to seemingly-better foreign lands, increasingly these are only symptoms helping tip their decisions.

Across the Middle East, North Africa and central Asia, the root cause of much of the current rash of violence and upheaval is lack of water. Or rather, a side-effect of government and big business control of that resource working to benefit some to the cost of many.

Recall that the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 came on the back of prolonged drought and a sharp spike in the price of grain. In Syria and Iraq, this fuelled civil war and the rise of Islamic State; there, water shortages are exacerbated by the massive Anatolia Project dam and irrigation scheme in neighbouring Turkey.

Turkey is the source of 88 per cent of the water that forms the Euphrates River, and 43 per cent of the Tigris. Between 2003-09, the Euphrates-Tigris Basin lost groundwater at a faster rate than any other region except northern India. It is not hard to surmise the Anatolia Project's 22 dams and 17,000 km2 of irrigation are siphoning off too much.

Similar cross-border water wars are going on between Egypt and Ethiopia; and Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. Elsewhere, as in Mali, the country's Government is the culprit; there, huge irrigation schemes to benefit Libyan and Chinese rice-growing interests are killing the inner Niger delta " a complex series of lakes and marshes that has sustained indigenous agriculture for millennia.

Depletion of aquifers has become a global problem. In Mexico's farming state of Guanajuato the water table is falling by two metres per year, while California's drought has farmers drilling deeper for water daily.

In China and India, two of the big three grain-growing countries, most grain crops are irrigated and sources are dwindling. Saudi Arabia tapped its aquifers to grow wheat, but has now admitted these are drained and is reverting to imports - transferring the problem.

Meanwhile, a World Bank report suggests Pakistan is about to degrade into "outright scarcity" of water supply due to population growth.

And so on.

The result is millions of people are now on the move, and millions more will join them, looking to re-home themselves in places where water is still plentiful. The migrant push into Europe - or the US from Mexico for that matter - is not so much about economics as it is survival.

As climate change impacts become more severe, not only will this refugee tide grow, it will spread. And despite our relative isolation, New Zealand will face an influx of refugees too, in this case because of too much water as Pacific island nations sink under rising seas.

Trying to stem the arrival of boat-people with draconian internment measures such as Australia employs - and which Hungary, Italy and Greece are flirting with adopting - is an ultimately fruitless exercise. Even extreme force, a macabre way to address a humanitarian crisis, would not stop this flood.

What wealthy nations must accept is that by using other people's land and other people's water to grow food for their own folk they are morally obliged to accommodate those displaced by these practices.

Climate refugees are a first-world problem that requires a first-world solution. We cannot turn our backs.

Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.