Datapanel for Understanding Global Water Cooperation and Conflict Dynamics

The panel forms the baseline for analysis of water-related cooperation and conflict events worldwide between 1951-2019. When the scientific paper is published, a link and reference will be added here.

The panel includes events per country-year, socioeconomic variables per country-year, and climatic variables per basin-year or country-year depending on availability. The data for demographic, economic, and climatic variables used in this study were sourced from various international databases (see table) and were here merged into a country-year panel (see figure). Water cooperation and conflict event records include the year, geographic location, and countries involved in conflict and cooperation (Kåresdotter et al., 2022b). The socio-economic variables include World Development Indicators (WDI), available from 1960 as yearly values per country. Precipitation data were obtained from outputs of the Water Balance Model (WBM) as modeled by Kåresdotter et al., (2022a), and extracted as yearly mean values per hydrological basin from HydroBASINS level 6 used for Aqueduct water risk indicators (Hofste et al., 2019; World Resources Institute, 2023, 2019). A baseline water stress was used for water stress, i.e., a long-term chronic water stress measure defined as the ratio of total water withdrawal to available renewable surface and groundwater supply (Hofste et al., 2019). Regional classifications are based on the United Nations Statistics Division geographic regions (UN Statistics Division, n.d.). The input datasets were consolidated to reflect basin-level values for conflicts and cooperation events, instead of using country-level mean values.

Table 1. Summary of variables in the water cooperation and conflict panel

Variable

Definition

Unit

Datasource

Event type

Type of water-related event (conflict, cooperation, both, no event)

Categorical (0 or 1)

Kåresdotter et al., (2022b)

Population density

Number of people per unit area

People per square km

WDI

Export

Export metrics of the country

USD

WDI

GDP per capita

Economic output per person

USD per person

WDI

Rural population

Proportion of population in rural areas

Percentage

WDI

Precipitation

Amount of rainfall or precipitation

Millimeters

Created for Kåresdotter et al., (2022a)

Water stress

Baseline water stress

Categorical (0 to 5)

 Aqueduct 3.0 (events up until 1984) and 4.0

Coordinates

Latitude and longitude of event

Degree

Kåresdotter et al., (2022b)

Region

Geographic region of event(s)

Region

UN Statistics Division

Event text

Text describing the conflict or cooperation event

Event text

Kåresdotter et al., (2022b)

Year

Year of observation

Year