国际河流(湖泊)水资源的竞争利用、冲突和求解,已引起国际社会的广泛关注,成为下世纪人类社会可持续发展和避免地区冲突的一个关键主题。本文简述了国际河流(湖泊)水资源的区域分布;统计分析了世界主要缺水国家的人水关系变化;指出产生竞争利用和冲突的主要动因和地区;给出解决冲突的三种方式。

The competitive utilization, conflict and solution of water resources in international rivers /lakes has al-ready attracted the widely concern from the international communities, and it will become a major factor deal-ing with the sustainable development of human societies and avoiding of the regional conflicts. In Africa andAsia, where the distribution of international rivers concentrates, the competitive utilization and conflict of thetrans boundary freshwater resources will be serious in the future.Towards the 21st century, the major factors, which cause such competitive utilization and conflict, willbe the rapid growing of economy and population in Asia and Africa; the increase of trans boundary regional e-conomic cooperation; the protection and conservation of the global biodiversity, the trend of the global sus-tainability; the lack of snaring freshwater resources in the world, and the global changes of climate and theincrease of its uncertainty. Among them, the key major factor is the rapid growing of population. In 1990, forexample, there are 18 countries with lower than 1 000 m annual water supply per person in the world. But to2025, this number will go up to 30 caused by only the population increase.The conflicts or disputes of snaring freshwater among riparian countries resources possibly appear inthose international river basin areas as follows; (1) Jordan River between Israel and Palestine; (2) the NileRiver among the riparian countries of Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia; (3) the Tigris- Euphrates River amongSyria, turkey, and Iraq; (4) the Ganges River between India and Bangladesh; (5) the Mekong River amongThailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam; (6) the Aral Sea among Afganistan, Iran, and the countries di-vorced from the former Soviet Union; , and the Evros/Maritza between Greece and Albania.There are approaches for us to solute these conflicts: (1) Signing agreement and establishing coordinateinstitution based on the international laws or the international cases; (2) through the implementation of inte-grated development and management of river basins, the objects of water resource utilization could be coordi-nated with those of other resources; (3) the conflicts of water resources could be solved in the wider scope bymeans of application of new theory or technology.