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Water is becoming increasingly scarce — and an even more powerful weapon in war, scientists warn.

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In Russia's war on Ukraine, water is both a target and a weapon.

Just three days after the start of the latest invasion, Russian forces destroyed a dam in Ukraine's Kherson region that had blocked water access to Russian-annexed Crimea.

In Mariupol, a city in southeastern Ukraine, Russian soldiers shut off local water supply as part of a brutal siege on the city, leaving the trapped population without access to safe drinking water or sanitation. The city fell into Russian hands earlier this week.

Moscow has made a point of targeting water infrastructure — including pipes, sewage treatment plants and pumping stations — in air strikes across the entire country, according to Tobias von Lossow, a research fellow at Dutch think tank Clingendael.

Blockading water supplies for local populations, as Russian forces did in Mariupol, has also proven to be a powerful tactic.

“Three months on, we see a humanitarian catastrophe and the starvation of cities — Mariupol or also Mykolaiv [a city in southern Ukraine], which has been without water for over a month,” said von Lossow. “The situation is particularly worrying in the heavily embattled or occupied territories in the east and the south.”

The EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell and Commissioner for the Environment Virginijus Sinkevičius in March accused Russia of “using the threat of dehydration to force the surrender of [Mariupol] and denying access to the most basic needs.”

Attacks on civilian water infrastructure violate international conventions. But the tactic has become increasingly common over the past decade, particularly in the Middle East, and it's one that Russia also routinely relies on, according to Ashok Swain, UNESCO’s chair of international water cooperation.

“As a close ally to the regime in Damascus, Russia has contributed to this weaponization of water in Syria, for example with attacks on pumping stations,” said von Lossow. “The Syrian regime and some of the opposition forces and also external actors kind of standardized the weaponization of water. We then saw similar cases in Yemen and in Libya.”

The tactic is attractive not only for its rapid impact, but also for demoralizing targeted populations, said Mark Zeitoun, director general of the Geneva Water Hub, a think tank.

Blocked access to water — or its contamination as a result of shelling of infrastructure like chemical sites — can also do long-term damage to a country's economy.

The United Nations Environment Program warned in 2018 that the Donbas region was "on the precipice of an ecological catastrophe fueled by air, soil and water pollution from the combustion of large amounts of ammunition in the fighting and flooding at industrial plants."

With hundreds of chemical, metallurgical and mining sites, atomic energy plants and nuclear waste dumps spread across Ukraine, the risks of water borne diseases caused by water contamination are high, said Juliane Schillinger, a researcher at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.

Weaponizing water is particularly effective when it is scarce or when a country — such as Ukraine, known as Europe’s breadbasket — is a heavily dependent on agriculture and irrigation.

With climate change set to make water even more scarce in a number of regions, it will increasingly play a role in conflicts, said Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute, a global water think tank.

According to the United Nations, nearly 6 billion people will suffer from clean water scarcity by 2050. Over half of the world’s projected 9.7 billion people will live in water-stressed regions by then, MIT researchers found.

“We're seeing more and more violence associated with water, as water becomes more scarce and more urgent and as climate change affects how much water we get and where we get it,” said Gleick, who tracks these conflicts in the World Water Chronology database.

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