1. population alignment: except in a few rare cases, people live near abundant water. Deserts are unpopulated, most major inland cities form next to river or lake.

2. water is inherently renewable. desalination, while expensive relative to freshwater, is less expensive and risky than war.

I'd say a far more important reason is that war disrupts the water supply to the point where it's counterproductive. You can't really "win" a war over water because you destroy what you're fighting for.

I disagree. At the macro level, many places with lots of water are very sparsely populated and many places with little water are densely populated. Typically mountainous or northerly regions have more water than do many coastal areas. As mentioned in the article, Canada is a prime example. Compare Colorado to California. California would shrivel up and fall into the Pacific ocean were it not for Colorado sending them water.

I agree with others on this forum, that violent conflicts do happen over water, they're just usually couched in other terms, like land wars.

In the California/Colorado case, there is a lot of tension. Growth is being impeded in Colorado because so much water is being sucked out of the state by peoples in the desert south west so that they can have have emerald green lawns and golf courses.

We may not have declared wars among nations.

But we certainly have legal warfare among the states.

And who says that the water that falls on the west side of the Rockies belongs to Colorado. Another way to look at the issue is to realize that the rivers leading out of the rockies--to the east, south, and west have done so for millennia. And those downstream states have a right to some of that water too.

Otherwise, Colorado is guilty of stealing water from the rivers and streams.

When some greedy farmers or ranchers in the old Westerns tried to dam up the streams and cut off their neighbors, someone always solved the problem with dynamite.