In Asia, an Opportunity to Strengthen Long-term Relationships though Natural Resource Cooperation

China is experiencing one of the worst droughts in 60 years experts say, in part a consequence of the Asian giant’s insatiable appetite for energy and water resources that are needed to sustain economic growth and newly accustomed standards of living. Beijing appears to be working to alleviate these conditions, spending more than a billion dollars on agricultural subsidies and farming irrigation to counter food shortages, deploying weather modification teams that cloud seed the atmosphere to generate precipitation (despite potential consequences from this and other geoengineering activities) and “moving heaven and Earth” to divert water from the south to bring it north to Beijing. But one thing Beijing should do is look for opportunities to cooperate with regional partners to help the country deal with its water woes. And with the Obama administration increasingly elevating water issues in bilateral relations with key partners around the world, Washington could use this as an opportunity to strengthen ties with Beijing.

Last month, Circle of Blue reported on the cascading effect that China’s energy demand is having on water scarcity. “Underlying China’s new standing in the world is an increasingly fierce competition between energy and water that threatens to upend China’s progress,” Circle of Blue’s Keith Schneider wrote. As Schneider pointed out, China’s history is fraught with challenges stemming from scarce fresh water resources, writing that it is nothing new for a state where “80 percent of the rainfall and snowmelt occurs in the south, while just 20 percent of the moisture occurs in the mostly desert regions of the north and west.” But what is different, Schneider noted, is the expanding industrial sector that consumes 70 percent of the nation’s water, and the need for the government to tap into its coal reserves in the north in order to feed this growth. The problem is that mining coal and coal-fired power plants themselves are water-intensive, and according to government officials, “there is not enough water to mine, process, and consume those [coal] reserves, and still develop the modern cities and manufacturing centers that China envisions for the region.”

In January, Schneider published a related story arguing that, with the United States experiencing similar challenges related to what he refers to as energy demand and water scarcity choke points, the United States and China have an opportunity to share technologies and policies that could help mitigate these challenges.

Indeed, natural resources should play a more integrated role in our diplomatic relations with Beijing. The United States already cooperates with China on a range of energy security and environmental sustainability initiatives, but these initiatives could be more evenly integrated into our diplomatic relations and given greater and more sustained attention at the senior levels of policymaking. Meanwhile, water scarcity is an area that is ripe for more robust cooperation between Washington and Beijing. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has acknowledged the potential for water and related issues to foster greater collaboration with international partners. “In the United States,” she told an audience last March, “water represents one of the great diplomatic and development opportunities of our time.”

Of course, there are many hurdles to greater engagement on these issues, especially on the energy side where concerns regarding intellectual property may chill potential cooperation. Nevertheless, high level engagement around natural resource challenges, including on energy demand and water scarcity, could help pull these issues from the periphery and signal that these challenges merit greater attention from Washington and Beijing in foreign policy discussions, fostering a greater sense of urgency while expanding opportunities for further collaboration. Framing these issues as foreign policy and security challenges– given that the actions by one state can have consequences for regional neighbors, especially with transboundary water resources– would be a tremendous leap forward in integrating natural resources into broader foreign policy considerations rather than treating them as environmental issues that might not otherwise make it on to the radar of senior foreign policymakers. And efforts such as these should extend beyond just the United States and China. In fact, natural resources should be given greater attention in multilateral discussions with other regional actors, including Japan, as well as integrated into high level ministerial meetings at ASEAN and APEC.

It won’t be easy to integrate natural resources into higher level foreign policy discussions, given the range of seemingly more pressing foreign policy, security, and economic challenges that plague the United States, China and other states around the region, including a nuclear North Korea and a still fragile global economy. Nevertheless, pulling these issues front and center will not only help give them the attention they deserve, but offer additional avenues to strengthen bilateral and multilateral relationship in Asia, perhaps even helping tip the U.S.-China relationship more towards long-term cooperation than competition.

This article originally appeared on the Center for a New American Security website.