Air Routes for Africa and Madagascar, Antartis.
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4.1 Introduction
The Western Indian Ocean (WIO) Region is “… part of a 21st Century version of the Great Game" (Chellaney, 2013), involving peace, security and stability on one hand and a renewed scramble for resources on the other. The growing interest in the riches of the oceans – including mineral wealth – together with competition for energy supplies and concern over the security of transport routes are intensifying and fuelling sometimes controversial geopolitical strategic positioning.
The WIO spans a large latitudinal range, from the Somalia region, influenced by the strong monsoon regime of the northern Indian Ocean, to the southern temperate regime of the tip of South Africa, where the Agulhas current diverges from the
northward-moving south-western Atlantic Benguela current. The WIO thus borders the entire east coast of the African continent and includes the tropical waters off Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa, as well as the islands of Madagascar, Comoros, Seychelles, Mauritius, and Réunion. It has unique characteristics of high biodiversity, both in terms of species and ecosystems, which place it as one of the most biodiversity rich and interesting ocean regions of the world (UNEP-Nairobi Convention and WIOMSA, 2015). Water – fresh and saline – has and will always be crucial for life and, thus, at the core of international and regional political dynamics influenced by geopolitical considerations.
The Indian Ocean maritime route has become one of the most important global gateways, especially for the transport of crude oil to Europe, North America, and East Asia. Other major commodities such as iron, coal, rubber, and tea also transit the route, as do manufactured goods in all directions. "The security, economic, cultural, and diplomatic spheres of influence in the twenty-first century have indeed begun to shift from the northern Atlantic to far distant oceans, but not just to the Pacific(...) The Indian Ocean region has rapidly emerged as the geographic nexus of vital economic and security issues that have global consequences."1
The consequent geopolitical repositioning will have an impact on the development of the Blue Economy in the region. Participants in the January 2014 Blue Economy Summit adopted the Abu Dhabi Declaration, "which describes the Blue Economy as a tool to promote, inter alia, sustainable development, poverty eradication and climate change mitigation in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and coastal countries."2 However, the concept of the Blue Economy applies to a wider sphere than SIDS and coastal countries;
it also includes land-locked countries and larger islands such as Madagascar. The Blue Economy builds on the same principles as the Green Economy3 and provides a new and dynamic framework for the WIO region to attain sustainable development.
1 Black, J (2009). Kindle Edition
2 http://biodiversity-l.iisd.org/news/Blue Economy-summit-adopts-abu-dhabi-declaration/. The Declaration stresses the importance of an enhanced mechanism for governing the high seas and urges further development of an integrated ecosystem approach to maintain balanced, healthy and productive marine ecosystems, including valuing blue capital and considering blue carbon trading
3 UNEP defines a green economy as one that results in “improved human well-being and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities”
89 The 19th Meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee of Experts (ICE) of UNECA’s Sub-Regional Office for Eastern Africa (SRO-EA) was held from 2 to 5 March, 2015, in Antananarivo on the theme of Harnessing the Blue Economy for Eastern Africa's Development. Participants in the meeting advocated a conception of the Blue
Economy that covers all bodies of water, including lakes and rivers, in addition to the oceans and coastlines. Thus, understanding the entire water cycle is the entry point to understanding the Blue Economy, while grasping the geopolitics of the region is essential to understanding the underlying policy challenges to implementation of the Blue Economy in the WIO.
According to the African Union's 2050 Africa's Integrated Maritime Strategy (2050 AIM-Strategy), most of Africa's Maritime Domain (AMD) is jeopardised by a number of threats and vulnerabilities. In relation to the Blue Economy and its geopolitical context, the following three are the most important:4
i. transnational organised crime, including money laundering, illegal arms and drug trafficking, piracy and armed robbery at sea, illegal oil bunkering / crude oil theft along African coasts, maritime terrorism, human trafficking, people smuggling and asylum seekers travelling by sea;
ii. illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing and overfishing, as well as environmental crimes including deliberate shipwrecking and oil spillage, and the dumping of toxic wastes;
iii. vulnerable legal frameworks, lack of and/or poorly maintained aids to navigation, absence of modern hydrographic surveys, up-to-date nautical charts and maritime safety information in a number of African Union member States.
The region faces many daunting security challenges, which have a negative impact both on community livelihoods and economically important sectors, such as tourism and maritime transport.
4.2 The Water Cycle
Geopolitics has hitherto not been strictly defined and has been considered controversial since it came into use at the end of the 19th century, but most definitions stress the
“the relationship between politics, principally the composition and use of power, and geographical factors, especially space, location and distance” (Black, 2009).
Geopolitics thus focuses on political power in connection with geographic space. In the context of the WIO region, in particular, it concerns waters within the national jurisdiction of coastal states and land territory. As an example, the freshwater, marine and coastal environment is a key resource for economically important productive sectors. "The seabed currently provides 32% of the global supply of hydrocarbons with exploration expanding. Advancing technologies are opening new frontiers of marine resource development from bio-prospecting to the mining of seabed mineral resources.
The sea also offers vast potential for renewable “blue energy” production from wind,
4 Africa Union (2012)
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wave, tidal, thermal and biomass sources." 5 This new geopolitical configuration has contributed to disputes over islands and coastal lands, as well as increasing insecurity on both land and sea. The potentially large revenues derived from these resources create geopolitical tensions between countries and make the demarcation of maritime zones of countries increasingly important.
The “Blue Planet” – Earth – is “blue” because oceans cover 72% of its surface. The geophysical assessment of the planet’s bodies of water (Figure 4.1) reveals a striking imbalance between reserves of freshwater (2.5% of total) and oceans (96.5%) in the world. Freshwater includes frozen water in glaciers, ice and snow, as well as fresh groundwater and soil moisture. Less than 0.01% of the world's freshwater exists as surface water in lakes, swamps and rivers. The African Great Lakes 6 constitute the largest proportion of surface freshwater in the world (27%).
The water cycle, or hydrological cycle, (Figure 4.2) is the motion of water from the ground to the atmosphere and back again. Of the many processes involved in the hydrological cycle, the most important are evaporation, transpiration, condensation, precipitation and runoff; these processes establish a link between all the earth’s water
5 Concept note on the Blue Economy (2013) (https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/)
6 http://www.globalgreatlakes.org/agl/ The African Great Lakes are a series of lakes in and around the East African Rift. They include Lake Victoria, the second largest fresh water lake in the world, and Lake Tanganyika, the world’s second largest in volume as well as the second deepest
Source: Igor Shiklomanov’s chapter “world fresh water resources” in Peter H. Gleick (editor) 1993, Water in Crisis: A Guide to the world’s Fresh Water Resources.
NOTE: Numbers are rounded, so percent summations may not add to 100.
Fresh water 2.5% FIGURE 4.1 Where is Earth's Water?
Source: http://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthwherewater.html