Mikaela Shiffrin, the U.S. skiing star who’s also her sport’s most decorated athlete of all time, broke her medals drought at the 2026 Olympics on Wednesday, taking home the gold in the women’s slalom.

The 30-year-old appeared stunned and visibly emotional over her triumph after completing a smooth second run in the slalom, which is her best event. She finished with a combined time of 1:39.10, beating Switzerland’s Camille Rast, who held the second place position after two runs, by a substantial 1.5 seconds. Anna Swenn Larsson of Sweden positioned herself in third place. 

Shiffrin had sped to an early lead in the event, finishing her first slalom run with a time of 47.13 seconds and gaining an advantage over Rast, Larsson, Germany’s Lena Duerr and other competitors.

Before this latest competition, Shiffrin, the biggest winner in the history of the World Cup circuit and a multi-time Olympian, had failed to make the podium in eight straight Olympic events. The last time she took home a medal was during the 2018 Winter Games in PyeongChang, when she won gold and silver. 

Shiffrin secured her first gold medal in the slalom event during the 2014 Games in Sochi. At just 18, it was also her Olympic debut. 

Shiffrin’s medals drought had persisted this year even as she competed in the women’s giant slalom event on Sunday. Despite being a favorite to win, she finished the race in 11th place, with a series of clean runs that weren’t quite fast enough to make her a serious challenger for top spots. 

Italy’s Frederica Brigone earned the gold in that event, marking fifth overall medal and her second gold since the Milan Cortina Games began. Shiffrin praised her performance after Brigone crossed the finish line.

“That was, like, the greatest show of GS skiing that we’ve had in a really long time,” Shiffin said. “And to do it, you know, at the Olympics where people actually have eyes on the sport. Frederica skied incredible. That was so cool to watch.”

Last week, Shiffrin finished in 15th place in the slalom portion of the women’s skiing team combined race. She and fellow U.S. skiing champion Breezy Johnson earned fourth place in the event overall.

In 2024, Shiffrin crashed after losing control while on the course for the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympics. Then last year, she said she was dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder from another crash, during which she suffered a puncture wound and severe trauma to her oblique muscles.

Lucia I Suarez Sang and

The Associated Press

contributed to this report.

In:

In Algeria, water shortages left faucets dry, prompting protesters to riot and set tires ablaze.

In Gaza, as people waited for water at a community tap, an Israeli drone fired on them, killing eight.

In Ukraine, Russian rockets slammed into the country’s largest dam, unleashing a plume of fire over the hydroelectric plant and causing widespread blackouts.

These are some of the 420 water-related conflicts researchers documented for 2024 in the latest update of the Pacific Institute’s Water Conflict Chronology, a global database of water-related violence.

The year featured a record number of violent incidents over water around the world, far surpassing the 355 in 2023, continuing a steeply rising trend. The violence more than quadrupled in the last five years.

The new data from the Oakland-based water think tank show also that drinking water wells, pipes and dams are increasingly coming under attack.

“In almost every region of the world, there is more and more violence being reported over water,” said Peter Gleick, the Pacific Institute’s co-founder and senior fellow, and it “underscores the urgent need for international attention.”

The researchers collect information from news reports and other sources and accounts. They classify it into three categories: instances in which water was a trigger of violence, water systems were targeted and water was a “casualty” of violence, for example when shell fragments hit a water tank.

Not every case involves injuries or deaths but many do.

The region with the most violent incidents was the Middle East, with 138 reported. That included 66 in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, both in Gaza and the West Bank.

In the West Bank there were numerous reports of Israeli settlers destroying water pipelines and tanks and attacking Palestinian farmers.

In Gaza the Israeli military destroyed more than 30 wells in the southern towns of Rafah and Khan Younis.

Gleick noted that when the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders last year, accusing them of crimes against humanity, the charges mentioned Israeli military attacks on Gaza water systems.

“It is an acknowledgment that these attacks are violations of international law,” he said. “There ought to be more enforcement of international laws protecting water systems from attacks.”

Water systems also were targeted frequently in the Russia-Ukraine war, in which the researchers tallied 51 violent incidents.

Russian strikes disrupted water service in Ukrainian cities, and oil spilled into a river after Russian forces attacked an oil depot.

“These aren’t water wars. These are wars in which water is being used as a weapon or is a casualty of the conflict,” Gleick said.

The researchers also found water scarcity and drought are prompting a growing number of violent conflicts.

“Climate change is making those problems worse,” Gleick said.

Many conflicts were in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

In India, residents angry about water shortages assaulted a city worker.

In Cameroon, rice farmers clashed with fishers, leaving one dead and three injured.

At a refugee camp in Kenya, three people died in a fight over drinking water.

There’s an increase in conflicts over irrigation, disputes pitting farmers against cities, and violence arising in places where only some water is safe to drink.

Gleick, who has been studying water-related violence for more than three decades, said the purpose of the list is to raise awareness and encourage policymakers to act to reduce fighting, bloodshed and turmoil.

The United Nations, in its Sustainable Development Goals, says every person should have access to water and sanitation.

“The failure to do that is inexcusable and it contributes to a lot of misery,” Gleick said. “It contributes to ill health, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, water-related diseases, and it contributes to conflicts over water.”

In Latin America, there were dozens of violent incidents involving water last year.

In the Mexican state of Veracruz, protesters were blocking a road to denounce a pork processing plant, which they accused of using too much water and spewing pollution, when police opened fire, killing two men.

In Honduras, environmental activist Juan López, who had spoken up to protect rivers from mining, was gunned down as he left church. He was the fourth member of his group to be murdered.

“There needs to be more attention on this issue, especially at the international level, but at the national level as well,” said Morgan Shimabuku, a senior researcher with the Pacific Institute. “It is getting worse, and we need to turn that tide.”

There have been few events reported in the U.S. in the recent years. In 2024, there were cyberattacks on water utilities in Texas and Indiana.

In one, Russian hackers claimed responsibility for tampering with an Indiana wastewater treatment plant. Authorities said the attack caused minimal disruption. In another, a pro-Russian hacktivist group manipulated systems at water facilities in small Texas towns, causing water to overflow.

The Pacific Institute’s database now lists more than 2,750 conflicts. Most have occurred since 2000. The researchers are adding incidents from 2025 as well as previous years.

During extreme drought in Iran worsened by climate change, farmers were desperate enough to go up against security forces, demanding access to river water. Iran’s water crisis, compounded by decades of excessive groundwater pumping, has grown so severe that the president said Tehran no longer can remain the capital and the government will have to move it to another city.

Tensions also have been growing between Iran and Afghanistan over the Helmand River, with Iranian leaders accusing their upstream neighbor of not letting enough water flow into the country.

Gleick said if the drought persists and the Iranian government doesn’t improve how it manages water, “I would expect to see more violence.”

IRVINE –– The Ducks finally see a bright glimmer at the end of their tunnel, but if they persist in their losing habits, it may just be a train barreling down on yet another season, which will begin Thursday in Seattle.

The Ducks, who had never failed to qualify for the postseason for more than three consecutive campaigns and were coming off the winningest five-year stretch in franchise history from 2013 to 2018, have now missed the playoffs seven seasons in a row. That’s not only the most in Ducks lore but also the longest active slump in the West, trailing only Detroit (nine seasons) and Buffalo (13 campaigns) league-wide.

Enter Joel Quenneville, a coach that arrived with some serious baggage but luggage that also contained four Stanley Cups, including three as a head coach with the Chicago Blackhawks. After a lengthy news conference justifying the hiring of Quenneville, who was suspended from NHL employment for his improper conduct amid a sexual abuse scandal in Chicago, the Ducks also hired three reputed assistants to pivot toward putting an end to their funk.

The ‘Q’ factor

Quenneville and General Manager Pat Verbeek were teammates in two different stops (New Jersey and Hartford) during their playing careers, and now they are reunited in Anaheim. Quenneville had taken over the Chicago Blackhawks’ then-youthful group and stewarded them on an ascent that has been unrivaled in the salary-cap era, winning titles in 2010, 2013 and, as Ducks fans remember all too well, 2015.

But Quenneville has not coached since 2021, when he was abruptly ousted from his post with the Florida Panthers by the NHL’s decision to suspend him from seeking employment. He’s now 67, making him the league’s oldest active head coach. He coached Florida to consecutive first-round exits, and subsequently the Panthers won the Presidents’ Trophy under Andrew Brunette, followed by three Eastern Conference crowns and two Stanley Cups under Paul Maurice.

Quenneville is now tasked with making a once model franchise relevant again. Frank Vatrano played under him in Florida, and as a group, the Ducks were enthusiastic about being guided by a coach with the gravitas of Quenneville.

“The message it sends to the players [is impactful], any time you can bring in a guy of that caliber. We’ve had some great coaches in here, but it feels like the time is now,” said Troy Terry, who now has the longest tenure on the team.

Leo season

OK, the Swedish center is actually a Capricorn, but Leo Carlsson’s campaign could be make-or-break for the Ducks. While he competed in more games and raised his scoring average marginally last season, the 20-year-old former No. 2 overall pick is now firmly in the No. 1 center role.

With Mason McTavish behind him and the former face of the franchise, Trevor Zegras, having been unceremoniously jettisoned in a trade to Philly, Carlsson is more at the fore than ever. He showed serious promise in the preseason finale, when he all but singlehandedly forced overtime in what had been a four-goal game with two goals and a primary assist down the stretch. Carlsson also headed The Athletic’s list of 2025-26 breakout candidates.

He represented the Tre Kronor at last year’s 4 Nations Face-Off and should be on his way to Milan to don gold and blue once again at the Olympics. His vision, skill and ability to navigate the neutral zone are already top-notch, and the sooner his body and game fill out, the sooner the Ducks could have a true superstar in their midst.

“Consistency for a young player is what you want to get to, but I thought last year he really trended in the right fashion,” Quenneville said. “He’s going into the regular season feeling good about himself and he should be excited about having a strong year and being a big part of our leadership group.”

Front-office pressure

Verbeek was brought in to chop up the remnants of the Ducks’ prosperous period under his predecessor, Bob Murray, and promptly stockpiled a formidable crop of young talent. Now, it’s time for those seeds to bear fruit, as Verbeek finally has the blessing of ownership to stop dinking and doinking and start spending and competing.

Gone are the days of taking on contracts just to hit the cap floor and seeking players to flip at the trade deadline in another deflating purge of talent. Chris Kreider, Ryan Poehling, Mikael Granlund and Petr Mrázek were all added to the mix –– and at least the chance of competition. The playoffs are no longer an abstract concept, but Verbeek’s Ducks will have plenty of work ahead to reify their aspirations.

Having taken the helm in 2022, only three players who dressed for the Ducks that season remain on the roster today: Lukáš Dostál, Mason McTavish and Troy Terry. This is now Verbeek’s team, and he no longer enjoys the convenience of low expectations.

“It feels like now, with Pat, most of the guys here are guys he brought in, so it feels like it’s different,” Ryan Strome said. “It also feels like some of our young players are a couple years ahead of where they were before. They’re ready to take premier roles, you add in the new coaching staff, and you’ve got to think that the takeoff is probably going to start now.”

BENGALURU, India — Despite two weeks of U.N.-sponsored talks in Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh, the participating 197 nations failed to agree early Saturday on a plan to deal with global droughts, made longer and more severe by a warming climate.

The biennial talks, known as COP 16 and organized by a UN body that deals with combating desertification and droughts, attempted to create strong global mandates to legally bind and require nations to fund early warning systems and build resilient infrastructure in poorer countries, particularly Africa, which is worst affected by the changes.

The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification released a report earlier this week warning that if global warming trends continue, nearly five billion people — including in most of Europe, parts of the western U.S., Brazil, eastern Asia and central Africa — will be affected by the drying of Earth’s lands by the end of the century, up from a quarter of the world’s population today. The report also said farming was particularly at risk, which can lead to food insecurity for communities worldwide.

This is the fourth time UN talks aimed at getting countries to agree to make more headway on tackling biodiversity loss, climate change and plastic pollution have either failed to reach a consensus or delivered disappointing results this year, worrying many nations, particularly the most vulnerable.

Nations participating in the Riyadh discussions decided to push the can down the road to the 2026 talks, hosted by Mongolia.

“Parties need more time to agree on what’s the best way forward to address the critical issue of drought,” said Ibrahim Thiaw, the UNCCD chief, speaking at the end of the Riyadh talks.

Thiaw said the conference was “like no other” in the talks’ 30-year history. “We have elevated the land and drought agenda beyond sector-specific discussions, establishing it as a cornerstone of global efforts to address inter-connected challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, food insecurity, migration and global security.”

Longer-lasting solutions to drought — such as the curbing of climate change — were not a talking point.

Host Saudi Arabia has been criticized in the past for stalling progress on curbing emissions from fossil fuels at other negotiations. The Gulf nation is one of the world’s largest oil producers and exporters with the second-largest global oil reserves.

Earlier in the conference, hosts Saudi Arabia, a few other countries and international banks pledged $2.15 billion for drought resilience. And the Arab Coordination Group, made up of 10 development banks based in the Middle East, committed $10 billion by 2030 to address degrading land, desertification and drought. The funds are expected to support 80 of the most vulnerable countries prepare for worsening drought conditions.

But the U.N. estimates that between 2007 and 2017, droughts will cost $125 billion worldwide.

Erika Gomez, lead negotiator from Panama said while a decision on dealing with drought was not reached, significant progress was made in other key issues.

“We have achieved several key milestones, particularly in the growing traction of civil society engagement and the gender decision,” Gomez said. “Until the very end, parties could not agree on whether or not the new instrument to respond to drought should be legally binding or not,” said Jes Weigelt of European climate think-tank TMG Research who has been tracking the talks.

“I fear, the UNCCD COP 16 has suffered the same fate as the biodiversity and climate COPs this year. It failed to deliver,” he said.

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Follow Sibi Arasu on X at @sibi123

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Severe weather threatens already-busy Thanksgiving travel home; How severe weather could impact Christmas trees.

It’s hard to think of a California company that carries more toxic baggage than Cadiz Inc.

The Los Angeles firm has been trying for more than 20 years to advance a plan to siphon water from under the Mojave Desert and pump it to users throughout Southern California. It has long been stymied by environmental objections, but stayed on life support by wielding political influence and regular financings such as private stock placements and junk bond-rated debt.

Now Cadiz is trying a new tack. Under its newly installed chief executive, the veteran government aide Susan Kennedy, it has affiliated itself with the so-called human right to water movement, which ties the inaccessibility of clean water for disadvantaged communities to other social justice quests such as developing more affordable housing.

Kennedy has a long and distinguished record in government, including stints working for former Govs. Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and service on the state Public Utilities Commission and on the board that oversees Covered California, the state’s Affordable Care Act exchange.

Kennedy, who joined the Cadiz board in February 2021, became its chair a year later and took over as CEO on Jan. 1, freely acknowledges that this is a heavy lift for a company with Cadiz’s lengthy and discreditable history.

“In Sacramento, the Cadiz name is a poison pill,” she told me. Upon becoming CEO, she says, “the first thing I had to do was change the company so people think about it differently.”

That approach, Kennedy says, includes dumping the company’s long-term lobbying firm, which was closely connected with the Trump administration, and placing more community activists on its board.

Most important, in her view, is refashioning Cadiz’s water project from one aimed at serving urban users throughout Southern California to a narrower goal of filling the admittedly serious gaps in the accessibility of clean water in San Bernardino County.

“The problem before,” she says, was that the Cadiz project involved “taking water out of the Mojave Desert and shipping it halfway across California to fill swimming pools in Los Angeles.”

That left locals in the lnland Empire with little reason to favor the company’s proposal. “This is very different,” she says. “This is keeping water local — Mojave water staying in the Mojave basin. It’s a key solution for the area,” which has limited access to water from the Colorado River or the State Water Project, two of the principal sources of water in California.

Kennedy says Cadiz’s new focus will initially be on converting an old natural gas pipeline running 86 miles between its desert acreage and Barstow to carry its water. The recipients would be “severely disadvantaged communities” currently dependent on the state water project, supplies from which are heavily impacted by drought.

It’s an understatement to say that California environmentalists, who have fought the company tooth and nail for more than 20 years, are skeptical.

“Cadiz is conducting a rebranding effort because its project has been a massive failure for decades, it carries significant financial risk, and it stands zero chance of securing numerous required federal and state permits,” says Neal Desai, senior regional program director of the National Parks Conservation Assn.

To best understand this conflict, let’s start at the beginning.

The Cadiz desert water scheme was the brainchild of CEO Keith Brackpool, a British former stock trader with a checkered history — in 1983 he pleaded guilty to criminal charges including dealing in securities without a license, and several years later was forced out of an executive role with a British food company for some dealings with a direct competitor.

Cadiz owned 35,000 acres overlying a desert aquifer. Cadiz‘s proposal to the giant Metropolitan Water District in 1997 “had a charming 25-words-or-less simplicity,” I wrote in 2006: The MWD would store its surplus water beneath Cadiz’s acreage in wet years and retrieve it during droughts, paying Cadiz a fee at both ends.”

Difficulties soon surfaced. The storage site was 35 miles from the MWD’s Colorado aqueduct, requiring a $150-million pipeline to be strung over environmentally sensitive territory.

The proposal committed the district to buy huge quantities of groundwater from Cadiz’s aquifer, but experts disagreed about how much could be safely extracted from the site; Cadiz estimated 30,000 acre-feet a year, but the U.S. Geological Survey and other independent sources regarded the estimate as optimistic by at least a factor of 10. The persistent drought in the West raised doubts over whether there would ever be much surplus for the MWD to store.

Then there were the company’s finances. One doesn’t wish to be churlish, but if you decide to open its most recent financial statement covering the first nine months of 2023, I’d advise doing so in a well-ventilated space.

The company reported an operating loss of $24.7 million on revenue of $1.3 million for that period, compared with a loss of $17.9 million on sales of $927,000 a year earlier. All the revenue comes from a farming operation on its desert landholdings. Cadiz hasn’t reported a profit since its first public financial disclosure in 1994; its accumulated deficit reached $603.3 million in 2022.

The original plan called for the $150-million cost to be shared by Cadiz and the MWD. Since Cadiz didn’t have the proverbial pot to, er, fill, it proposed that the MWD lend it the money for its share, largely through a “prepayment” for the storage of MWD water. But the company’s existing lenders had the right to demand repayment of their loans from any funds provided by MWD, so almost nothing would be available for construction.

The MWD rejected the plan in 2002. By any rational expectation, that should have killed the project for good.

But its critics didn’t reckon with Brackpool’s ability to endow his firm with political supporters.

Although the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) was a sworn adversary, her opposition was counterbalanced at first by advocates such as former Gov. Gray Davis, whose 1998 and 2002 gubernatorial campaigns collected $235,000 in donations from Cadiz.

In return, Davis made Brackpool his advisor on water. Their relationship put pressure on the MWD to play ball with Cadiz, which may have explained why it took the water district until 2002 to put the kibosh on the plan.

Over subsequent years, Brackpool hobnobbed with former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who landed for a time on the company’s payroll. In 2006, he persuaded then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to endorse Cadiz as “a path-breaking, new, sustainable groundwater conservation and storage project.”

The most important support may have come from Donald Trump. He appointed David Bernhardt, a former lawyer and lobbyist for Cadiz, as his Interior secretary in 2019, giving Bernhardt authority over crucial federal approvals the company needed for its desert pipeline.

Bernhardt came from the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, which included Cadiz as a client; the company’s then-CEO, Scott Slater, was — and is — a partner in the firm. Cadiz had paid the Brownstein firm $2.75 million in lobbying fees and 200,000 shares of stock while Bernhardt was there. Bernhardt is now back at the firm, serving as a senior counsel in its Washington office. Slater, who no longer has an executive or governance role at Cadiz, is currently listed as a member of the law firm’s executive committee.

In December 2020, as the Trump administration was preparing to leave office, the Bureau of Land Management, an Interior Department subagency, abruptly approved Cadiz’s acquisition of the gas pipeline crossing the Mojave and for its conversion to carry water — ruling that the acquisition and conversion required no environmental impact studies. That was a “rushed, cursory decision,” a federal judge later found.

The Biden administration rescinded the approvals in 2021 so the BLM would have time to perform the environmental analysis required by law. Last month the agency reissued the approval for Cadiz to acquire the gas pipeline, but not to convert it for water. The latter decision, it had earlier assured Feinstein, would require “intensive environmental studies of … potential impacts,” including those caused by the extraction of water from the aquifer.

Kennedy says Cadiz no longer employs Brownstein and recognizes that the 2020 BLM ruling was vulnerable to legal challenge. Brackpool retired from the Cadiz board last year, which apparently ended his relationship with the company.

That points to perhaps the most serious obstacle to Cadiz’s project: Doubts about the environmental impact of taking water from the Mojave aquifer. Kennedy says the company has in hand technical studies indicating that it can safely extract 50,000 acre-feet of water annually for 50 years without causing environmental damage. But those studies are at odds with decades of independent and government studies placing the safe extraction level in the neighborhood of about 30,000 acre-feet and as low as 3,000. Settling this crucial technical issue could take years.

And that brings us to a linchpin of Kennedy’s efforts to change Cadiz’s image from water profiteer to responsible steward of a precious, and increasingly scarce, natural resource. She points out, accurately, that as many as 1 million Californians lack reliable access to clean water.

The question is whether Cadiz is the answer to the problem. Kennedy says it is, for inland water users. If environmental groups would only sit down with her “and map out an optimal water strategy, we would be part of that — what we’re doing would be key for that area of the state.”

Yet established organizations that have been focused on environmental justice say they haven’t heard from Cadiz. The company has associated itself with a new group called Groundswell for Water, which appears to be a coalition of community groups, few of which have played any prior role in water policy, but which received startup funding from Cadiz.

Among the established groups that say they haven’t received outreach from Cadiz are the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water and Clean Water Action. The Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity were plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit that challenged a Trump-era decision allowing the water project to move ahead.

Through its spokesman Ed Sanders, Groundswell says it doesn’t represent Cadiz but aims to represent “the one million Californians, primarily people of color, who don’t have access to clean water. “

The group’s major misstep may have been to imply an association with Dolores Huerta, who was a top associate of Cesar Chavez in the United Farm Workers movement and remains, at 93, an icon of progressive community activism.

Having discovered that it was posting photographs of her and using her name as though she was a member, an infuriated Huerta issued a public letter crisply condemning Groundswell as “an astroturf group … co-opting the language of environmental justice” and seeking “to pit organizations of color against environmental groups.”

Can Cadiz succeed in its new guise? In her favor, Kennedy can cite the undeniably intensifying water crisis, not merely in the Inland Empire but statewide. This will dial up the pressure to exploit new water sources of all varieties.

Cadiz’s ambitions have distinctly shrunk since it first sprang from Brackpool’s imagination. Kennedy says that the firm’s plan today is to turn a profit entirely from the sale of water to Inland Empire water districts. They, not Cadiz, would be the applicants for state and federal permits, which she hopes might make it harder for regulatory agencies to ignore their interests.

On the other side is a very suspect corporate history. That’s the hill Kennedy still must climb. She says outreach to environmental and community groups is high on her agenda, but their resistance to anything labeled “Cadiz” is potent indeed. “I have a long way to go to change opinions,” she says.

Six months ago, an explosion ripped apart Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine, unleashing floods that killed 58 people, devastated the landscape along the Dnipro River and cut off water to productive farmland.

The destruction of the dam — which Ukrainian officials and the European Parliament blame on Russia, even though the structure was under Russian control — was one in a series of attacks on water infrastructure that have occurred during the Russia-Ukraine war.

Alongside those strikes, violence linked to water has erupted this year in other areas around the world.

In countries including India, Kenya and Yemen, disputes over water have triggered bloodshed.

And on the Iran-Afghanistan border, a conflict centering on water from the Helmand River boiled over in deadly clashes between the two countries’ forces.

These are some of the 344 instances of water-related conflicts worldwide during 2022 and the first half of 2023, according to data compiled by researchers at the Pacific Institute, a global water think tank. Their newly updated data, collected through an effort called the Water Conflict Chronology, shows a major upsurge in violent incidents, driven partly by the targeting of dams and water systems in Ukraine as well as an increase in water-related violence in the Middle East and other regions.

“It’s very disturbing that in particular attacks on civilian water infrastructure seem to be on the rise,” said Peter Gleick, the Pacific Institute’s co-founder and senior fellow. “We also see a worrying increase in violence associated with water scarcity worsened by drought, climate disruptions, growing populations, and competition for water.”

Gleick has been tracking cases of water-related conflict for more than three decades and cataloged the latest incidents with other researchers at the Oakland-based institute.

The database now lists more than 1,630 conflicts. Most of the cases have occurred since 2000, and there has been a rising trend over the last decade, with a spike the last few years.

The researchers collect data from news reports and other sources and accounts. They classify instances into three categories: where water or water systems have been a trigger of violence, used as a “weapon” or have been targeted and become a “casualty” of violence.

Not every case involves injuries or deaths, but many do.

In African countries including Nigeria, Somalia and South Sudan, fighting has erupted between farmers and herders over water sources and land.

“There have been a growing number of incidents where drought has led to violence associated with disputes over control and access to freshwater,” Gleick said.

In South Africa, protests over lack of access to clean water have turned volatile, with people burning tires and throwing rocks at police. During droughts in Iran and India, protests over water shortages have also sparked violence.

“We know that climate change is worsening severe droughts, and that makes me worry that these kinds of incidents will become more common,” Gleick said.

Parsing the mix of factors that lead to water conflicts is complicated and an area Gleick and his colleagues plan to study further — including the role climate change is playing in worsening scarcity and contributing to violence.

During the last two years, they have also seen a large increase in the number of “casualty” incidents, in which water infrastructure is targeted.

The latest additions to the database include 56 incidents from the Russia-Ukraine war, many of them involving attacks on water infrastructure.

In 2022, Russian troops bombed a water system in Kherson and a pumping plant in Chernihiv, and were blamed for deliberately cutting off the water supply to the city of Mykolaiv. Ukraine’s military also flooded lands north of Kyiv to block a Russian assault on the capital.

This year, Russian forces destroyed dams and other infrastructure, and disrupted water supplies for 35,000 people during an assault on Marhanets.

The destruction of Kakhovka Dam has eliminated irrigation for large areas of agricultural land in southern Ukraine, harming food production and the Ukrainian economy.

Many of these attacks appear to violate the Geneva Conventions and other international treaties that prohibit attacks on civilian water infrastructure during war, Gleick said.

The latest data show there have been 107 conflicts over water reported in the Middle East since the start of 2022, with about 60% of those involving incidents between Israelis and Palestinians.

In various cases in the West Bank, Israeli military forces have destroyed Palestinian-owned wells and water systems. Israeli settlers have demolished water tanks and pipes belonging to Palestinians, and seized control of wells and water sources.

And Palestinians have repeatedly clashed with Israeli troops in disputes over wells and springs, including a case in which violence erupted after troops prevented Palestinians from digging a well.

Because the researchers have yet to analyze reports of conflicts during the last six months, they don’t have detailed information about water-related violence in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

In the West Bank, incidents involving the destruction of orchards, irrigation systems and water tanks have been happening for years, “but it picked up a lot in the last two years,” said Morgan Shimabuku, a senior researcher at the Pacific Institute.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, there have been deadly fights over control of water sources in Yemen, bombings of water infrastructure in Syria, and clashes during protests over lack of water in Iraq.

Shimabuku said efforts to ease conflicts will require “protecting civilian water infrastructure and resources and developing water-governance structures that are just and equitable.”

Different patterns of violence have emerged in other regions. In Latin America, hundreds of environmental activists have been killed in recent years, including many Indigenous activists.

In one of the most infamous cases, Honduran Indigenous activist Berta Cáceres was shot and killed in 2016 after years of threats over her work to stop a dam project on the Gualcarque River.

There have been many more killings in the last few years. Those listed in the database include the assassinations of a Honduran activist who protested an open-pit mine in 2020, a Honduran activist who was fighting a new dam on the Ulua River in 2021, and an activist in Cuernavaca, Mexico, who had led protests over inadequate water service.

In various cases, Shimabuku said, Indigenous people have been involved in violent conflicts over water and land protection where “government-backed corporate entities are committing violence.”

“A lot of those are people protecting water, because they don’t want a dam built, they don’t want their forests to be destroyed, and their rivers to be destroyed,” Shimabuku said.

Gleick said one of the goals in tracking data about conflicts is to shed light on connections between water and peace and security.

“Understanding what’s driving these events can help us develop strategies to reduce the risk of violence over water,” Gleick said.

The history of water-related conflicts and the recent rise in violence are among the subjects Gleick analyzes in his book “The Three Ages of Water: Prehistoric Past, Imperiled Present, and a Hope for the Future.”

In it, Gleick presents a wide-ranging and meticulously researched examination of humans’ relationship to water throughout history, from ancient Mesopotamia to the present, and shares a hopeful vision for how societies can address water challenges and move toward a more sustainable future.

He calls for new thinking and approaches to address lack of water access, worsening pollution, overtapped rivers and aquifers, and collapsing ecosystems. He also envisions a peaceful future where conflicts are dealt with peacefully and water-related violence is fading.

Gleick traces the history of conflicts to the first known war over water nearly 4,500 years ago between the ancient Sumerian city-states of Lagash and Umma in what is now southern Iraq. The conflict’s history was carved into clay tablets and limestone monuments that archaeologists excavated in the floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

He discusses other conflicts over water through the centuries, including the recent example of Syrian civil war, which was ignited in 2011 by a mix of factors including anger at the repressive government, years of drought and the worsening impacts of climate change.

Gleick writes that today violence triggered by water is worsening around the world for reasons including “weak or corrupt governments and water laws, uneven access to scarce water, inequitable distribution of water rights, and extreme droughts that threaten the health and stability of economies and communities.”

Gleick says he believes that “just as water has been a source of conflict and violence, it can be a source of peace, cooperation and sustainable development.”

He described it as an effort to avoid the sort of dystopian future of fighting over water depicted in movies such as “Mad Max.”

Gleick pointed out that in the past there has been bloodshed over water in the western United States, including a conflict between ranchers in 1892 in Johnson County, Wyo.

There are few recent U.S. conflicts in the database. Part of the reason such violence has faded, Gleick said, is because U.S. laws and institutions are stronger than they once were.

“We’ve moved to the courts,” Gleick said. “And while there’s still too many conflicts over water, fighting over things with lawyers is better than fighting over things with guns.”

Globally, many conflicts triggered by water happen where institutions are weak, water management is poor, water rights are disputed, or laws are unfairly enforced. A solution, he said, “is to make sure that everyone has access to safe water and sanitation, basic needs, and that the institutions for sharing and allocating water resources, and resolving disputes over water resources, are strong.”

In the book, Gleick writes that our age, which he calls the Second Age of Water, is coming to an end in a series of crises. He offers his vision for how to move toward a more sustainable and peaceful Third Age of Water, calling for multiple solutions, such as ending “water poverty” for the many who lack access to safe water, carrying out an “efficiency revolution” in water use, reforming water institutions, and reaching more water-sharing agreements among countries.

“The overarching point is that what appears to be a growing trend of violence associated with water is a symptom of the broad water crises we face,” Gleick said. “But it’s also an opportunity to tackle the underlying problems of water poverty, of poor institutions, of weak governance, of inequitable access to water and inadequately enforced water laws. And if we can address those challenges, we really have an opportunity to reduce violence associated with water problems.”