The Right to Water in the Arab Region: Climate Change Challenges and Considerations

Introduction

Access to safe water and adequate sanitation constitutes one of the most fundamental requirements for human dignity, public health, and decent socio-economic conditions. Yet across the Arab region, this access remains profoundly unequal, structurally constrained, and increasingly threatened. The Arab Watch Report 2025 examines how water use, misuse, and imposed policies are affecting societies across the region, with particular attention to marginalized groups. It traces the historical evolution of water allocation in different countries and identifies common challenges to realizing this vital right. Through thematic analyses, national reports, and case studies, the AWR evaluates national water issues from a political economy perspective, critically examining neoliberal policies and their impacts on vulnerable communities and the environment. Rather than accepting the terms of technocratic water management, the report advances a vision of water as a common resource, publicly, democratically, and sovereignly governed and equitably distributed. The work is aimed at social movements, civil society organizations, local stakeholders, and international bodies to advocate for inclusive, socially just water policies and nature-based solutions in the region.

The report rejects the mainstream reductionist view that frames the water crisis as a technical, administrative, or natural scarcity problem. Instead, it demonstrates how decision-making is driven by international capital hegemony and systematically alienated from citizens, and, in the case of Palestine, subject to complete domination. From the 2003 war on Iraq to the wars in Syria and Libya since 2011, Yemen since 2014, Gaza and Lebanon since 2023, Sudan through 2024, and Iran in 2026, alongside the demonstrated fragility of desalination dependence in Gulf states, water bears the imprint of social injustice.

Wars, climate change, economic crises, agricultural intensification, urbanization, industrial and extractive pollution, and decades of intensive exploitation of land and water have all produced a multidimensional water crisis. Its burden falls most heavily on the poor and marginalized: rural communities, peasants, fishermen, migrant workers, refugees, women and children, and minorities. Given its far-reaching consequences on health, livelihoods, food security, and overall socio-economic conditions, identifying the political and economic drivers of this crisis at the national, regional, and international levels is of urgent importance.

An estimated 50 million people across the Arab region lack access to safe drinking water, while 154 million lack safe sanitation. These figures mask severe disparities between rural and urban populations and across conflict-affected territories (ESCWA, 2024). Rural residents remain the most underserved, with access rates substantially below urban averages. This gap deepens sharply in conflict zones, where water infrastructure has been systematically damaged or destroyed. The Arab region is among the most unequal globally (ESCWA, 2022). Alongside an extreme concentration of wealth, Arab societies continue to face widespread authoritarianism, which cannot be separated from global financial capital. This is reinforced by the expanding influence of international and regional financial institutions since the adoption of Dublin Principle 4 in 1992, which entrenched the treatment of water as an economic commodity, promoting privatization and the divestment of public assets.

This chapter opens with the regional context and the accelerating threat of climate change before tracing the long history of water rights and development paradigms in the Arab world, from Islamic and Ottoman foundations through colonial concessions, Cold War megaprojects, and the neoliberal privatization wave. It then examines governance failures, international accountability, and the right to water under SDG 6. The chapter further develops a political ecology lens on water, mapping the intersecting forces of power, dispossession, and struggles over the commons that shape water access across the region. A comparative analysis synthesizes findings across fifteen national contexts, followed by a concluding section that advances recommendations for transformative change toward a post-neoliberal water model that reclaims water as a common resource.