As countries across Africa face growing pressure over shared water resources, USC water scientists argue that one of the most powerful tools for preventing conflict may be found not at the negotiating table, but in the mathematical models used to understand water itself.
Essam Heggy, a research scientist in USC Viterbi School of Engineering and USC Mark and Mary Stevens School of Computing and AI ’s Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and co-founder of the USC Water ReUse and Resource Recovery Center , believes that African water conflicts are driven less by an absolute lack of water than by uncertainty over how much water will be available under extreme climate conditions like droughts, and how that supply may change.
In a new commentary published in Nature Sustainability last month, Heggy and his co-authors call for greater visibility and support for rigorous, reproducible African water research in major scientific journals.
They emphasize that stronger scientific evidence through reproducible modeling could give governments and international organizations a shared foundation for managing transboundary water resources and resolving disputes. This scientific clarity can then become a foundation for diplomacy.
The commentary titled “ African water research beyond the narratives of conflict and scarcity ,” was led by Heggy, with co-authors, Jongeun You , a political scientist at Northern Michigan University ; Abotalib Z. Abotalib of Egypt’s National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences ; Sara S. Fouad , a researcher at the Technical University of Munich ; and Mohamed Ramah , a PhD student from the Université Catholique de Louvain .
The piece builds on Heggy’s broader research at USC, where he studies water resources and climatic change in arid environments using tools including remote sensing and environmental modeling. His work has examined groundwater, drought and extreme flooding across North Africa and the Middle East.
Africa contains 63 transboundary river basins that support more than 1 billion people, including the Congo, Niger and Zambezi basins.
The Nile River basin provides a central example of the challenges Heggy describes. Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt depend on the river for different, often competing needs, with upstream countries pursuing hydropower development while downstream communities depend on reliable water flows. In previous research Heggy and his collaborators have examined this problem, including how prolonged drought could affect the operation of major dams and the distribution of water and hydropower resources under rising hydroclimatic fluctuations in the continent.
However, robust, reproducible research focused on these shared resources remains underrepresented in highly visible scientific journals.
That gap can have risky consequences. When local, peer-reviewed research is difficult to find in prominent scientific publications, governments may increasingly turn to private consulting firms or interest groups for technical guidance, according to the authors — groups whose priorities or agendas may not always align with the public interest.
While advice from those groups can be useful for addressing immediate needs, but may not fully address long-term changes in climate, water and hydropower availability and river-basin dynamics.
For Heggy, the deeper problem is not simply that there is too little water: countries often do not know with enough certainty how much water they will have.
Water wars” are not necessarily driven by the physical volume of water alone, but by uncertainty over that volume and how climate variability could change it.
Heggy describes this as an “uncertainty crisis.” When countries share finite water and hydropower resources but lack reliable, commonly accepted estimates of its volume and future variability, each side can perceive the unknown as an existential threat.
Heggy believes the solution begins with open data and reproducible numerical models.
Advanced numerical and hydroclimatic modeling can simulate how water moves through river basins and how it generates sustainable hydropower under different climate and management scenarios. By quantifying water availability, flow patterns, drought conditions and potential impacts of infrastructure decisions, these models can help turn an uncertain resource into a measurable one.
Rather than relying on competing narratives about who has a right to a river’s water, governments could use transparent, reproducible models to evaluate how different decisions would affect countries across a shared basin under different climatic scenarios.
In the Nile, for example, modeling can help assess how dam operations during prolonged droughts could balance Ethiopia’s need for hydropower with Egypt’s need for downstream water.
But Heggy believes that better science alone is not enough: the scientific community also needs to make sure that African water research reaches the policymakers who need it.
In the Nature Sustainability commentary, the authors call on major scientific journals to strengthen editorial engagement with African water research, including expanding editorial expertise and encouraging solution-oriented research grounded in local data and in-situ monitoring.
They claim that greater visibility for this work could help ensure that scientific evidence, instead of uncertainty and competing narratives, guides negotiations over shared water resources.
“Evidence-based diplomacy depends on science,” Heggy argues. By reducing uncertainty through open, reproducible science, researchers can create the scientific foundation needed for cooperation before water disputes become crises and give countries a common factual foundation for cooperation—turning scientific modeling into a tool for diplomacy and, potentially, peace.
Nature Sustainability
Commentary/editorial
Not applicable
African water research beyond the narratives of conflict and scarcity
21-Jul-2026