As water scarcity in both China and India worsens, the competition over shared water resources in their transboundary rivers, particularly the Brahmaputra River, is set to intensify. Without an effective working mechanism between the two countries, water conflicts could potentially become a serious challenge to Sino-Indian relations. Nonetheless, the water wars narrative, which is gaining steam in India, is being overstated. This article argues that the major supporting arguments of the water wars narrative are very weak.

The Environmental Justice Atlas or EJAtlas.org is a freely accessible on-line interactive information portal that helps academic scholars and public policymakers across the world in identifying exemplary cases of peoples’ resistance against climate change and environment degradation. EJAtlas.org is conceived by the EJOLT project – an acronym for the ‘Environmental Justice, Liabilities and Trade’ project. EJOLT is a European Commission FP7 programme-funded global research project operated during 2011–2015 and concluded recently.

Global freshwater vulnerability is a product of environmental and human dimensions, however, it is rarely assessed as such. Our approach identifies freshwater vulnerability using four broad categories: endowment, demand, infrastructure, and institutions, to capture impacts on natural and managed water systems within the coupled human–hydrologic environment. These categories are represented by 19 different endogenous and exogenous characteristics affecting water supply vulnerability.