Beyond the cloud: The new global battlegrounds for water, food, genes, and space

The geopolitics of the 21st century is no longer reduced to shielding borders or accumulating oil reserves: power is measured in liters of fresh water, terabytes of genetic data, tons of lithium, and satellite orbits. While climate change, population explosion and the convergence of exponential technologies accelerate scarcity, states and corporations are preparing their strategies for a world where controlling what is scarce is equivalent to imposing order.

Water comes forward as the first big trigger. 40% of the world's population lives in basins that are already scarce six months a year; Egypt threatens to sabotage the Nile dam that Ethiopia completed in 2023, while Turkey diverts the Euphrates and leaves Iraq without water to irrigate its wheat. Water migrations of up to 700 million people are expected by 2030, according to the World Bank, and mass desalination plans rely on South American lithium and copper, closing a circle of cross-dependencies.

Food becomes reserve currency. Saudi Arabia and China buy or lease 5% of Africa's arable land; with the war in Ukraine, wheat is traded as a strategic commodity and hedge funds speculate with grain index funds. Food sovereignty is no longer peasant rhetoric; it is the ability to deny exports when your own population is hungry, as India did with rice in 2022.

Behind every farm is a chip. Precision agriculture, drones, biosensors and CRISPR seeds increase yields, but also technological debts: 70% of patents on gene-edited crops belong to four conglomerates in the US and China. Whoever controls the "smart" seeds will be able to program the yield – and obsolescence – of other people's fields.

Biotechnology turns life into a strategic resource. Sequencing massive genomes allows for personalized vaccines, but also biological weapons that target specific ethnic groups. The fear of a "crispr-bomb" that only attacks carrying a certain genetic marker has led the US and China to create mobile P-4 laboratories and secret funds for genomic countermeasures, reviving the biological race that seemed to have been overcome after the Cold War.

Lithium, cobalt and rare earths are the new oil of electromovement. 60% of lithium lies in the Argentina-Bolivia-Chile triangle, but the refining is done by China and Korea, which keep 80% of the margin. Washington has placed lithium on the critical list of National Defense and the Pentagon finances oxide plants in Nevada and Texas; Moscow, for its part, has just placed solid-state batteries in T-14 tanks, demonstrating that green minerals are also useful for conventional warfare.

Artificial intelligence is being militarized at exponential speed. Israeli algorithms select targets in Gaza in 15 seconds; Turkish Kargu-2 drones attack without human confirmation; and U.S. soldiers test augmented headsets connected to Microsoft's cloud. Algorithmic warfare eliminates traditional scale; a teenager with a laptop can hack into a power grid or fake a president's voice, forcing a redesign of the doctrine of deterrence to include cyber-militias and offensive AI.

Outer space becomes the lawless high seas. Starlink already deploys 5,000 satellites that double as a reconnaissance platform; China responds with its own constellation and with service satellites that can drag and destroy those of the competition. NATO has declared space "operational domain" and India has just tested an anti-satellite missile, adding millions of debris that turn low orbit into a minefield for the global economy.

The Arctic, once a zone of peace, is militarized as it melts. Russia reopens 50 Soviet bases, China sends nuclear icebreakers and NATO is conducting exercises in Norway to protect new sea lanes that shorten the Asia-Europe journey by 15 days. Hidden under the ice are 90,000 million barrels of oil and 25% of the undiscovered gas, enough to fuel new conflicts over wells and pipelines in an ecosystem that had never hosted them.

The common denominator is lethal interdependence: water needs lithium, food requires chips, satellites rely on rare earths, and AI is powered by data traveling on wires that traverse oceans and rival jurisdictions. No country is self-sufficient, but whoever manages to write the rules, hoard critical resources, and shield their supply chains will impose the new world order. The war for digital sovereignty was only the prologue to an era of multiple confrontations where the entire planet will be the chessboard.