New global dataset on historical water-related conflict and cooperation events

The water-related conflict and cooperation events database was created as a part of a larger project: "The missing link: how does the climate affect human conflicts and collaborations through water?" where the goal is to increase understanding of how people and the climate affect water flows and how, in turn, these changes affect cooperation and conflicts over water. Formas, project 2017-00,608 support this project.

The database includes a collection of cooperation and conflict events between 1951 and 2019. The Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (2010) and WCC (Pacific Institute, Oakland, CA, 2022) were used as data on water-related acts of cooperation and conflict over time. As TFDD cooperation data ends in 2008, cooperation events were extended following a similar methodology as was used in the creation of TFDD. Further, geographic locations and regional classifications were added to all events, which can be used to create visualizations and extract subsets of the database for different parts of the world. The database methodology flow chart included in the files gives a brief overview of steps taken to prepare and process the data into the database.

The openly available scientific article in Science of the Total Environment (STOTEN) highlight findings using this dataset and gives further explanations relating to the database. The article can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.161555.