Water wars inevitable if Pakistan delays climate and water reforms

The real possibility of water wars in South Asia is no longer a dream of something that might be happening–it is an emergent reality and Pakistan will be in the core of the conflict. Global warming, poor resource management, and geopolitics are coming together to become a golden combination that can topple the economic, agricultural and even domestic security of the country. If Pakistan does not act decisively in the current situation it may soon find itself as the early casualty of another age of resource-based wars.

Pakistan has already become one of the world water-stressed countries. The Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) has indicated that per capita availability of water, which is currently below 1, 000 cubic meters, has fallen rigorously by up to 5,260 cubic meters that existed in 1951, and this according to the UN, is already a water scarcity. There is a clockwise circulation of air currents that reduces this desertification with climate change speeding it up due to inconsistent monsoon trends, high glacier melting in Himalayas and long drought in arid areas such as Sindh and Balochistan.

The Indus River system is the lifeline of Pakistan that meets more than 90% of its agricultural water. But this resource is fast facing both environmental and political pressures. Since the creation of the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), India as the upper riparian nation has started maximizing its water share ever since the 2016 Uri attack and domestic striving to worsen the bilateral relationship. Although the treaty has been stable in more than sixty years, water shortage as a by-product of climate change may destabilize the pact hence precipitating tension between the two nuclear-armed countries.

In the domestic setting, this is as circumstantial and frightening. Pakistan is losing up to a third of the available water to water theft as well as inefficient irrigation methods and a lack of modern storage before it even reaches the fields. Lack of an overall water policy until 2018 took institutional negligence to a new area. To date, implementation is still slow, disjointed and politically disputed.

Failure to take any action has dire results. A water shortage might cripple the agriculture-based economy in Pakistan which employs close to 40 percent of working people and also contributes/ gross domestic product- 19 percent. The effects of the reduced yield would mean that the country will have to import at an expensive price at the time when the foreign exchange reserves are already limited. Additionally, the displacement of the rural population that relies on the agricultural sector might result in overcrowding the cities and social turbulences which is a formula of political instability.

The concept of water wars is considered by some analysts to be alarmist and cooperation is far likelier than confrontation. On the one hand, it is not wrong to say that shared rivers promote dialogue but, on the other hand, history demonstrates that scarcity always brings fierce competition particularly when political disagreements were not solved yet. A glaring example of how water can be the bridge and a battleground is exhibited by the Nile Basin between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt.

In the case of Pakistan, preparation involves the readiness to handle the supply side as well as the demand side to the equation. On the demand side investment for water storage facility is essential. Building of big dams such as Diamer-Bhasha and smaller reservoirs will go a long way in regulating supply during dry periods. At the same time, it is critical to preserve the glaciers of Hindu Kush-Himalayan region in the context of reforestation and adaptation of climate change programs.

On the demand side, Pakistan has to implement radical transformation of agriculture. Inefficient flood irrigation wastage consumes huge quantities of water. Adopting new methods like the drip and sprinkler irrigation method will make efficiency to be very high. There is also necessity to change crop patterns, water intensive crops such as sugarcane and rice being cultivated in water deficient places is nothing but failure of policy and is no longer affordable on part of Pakistan.

As a diplomatic move, Pakistan ought to enhance transboundary water-related dialogue with India as an instrument of IWT, which may be broadened to also encompass climate change adaptation. On one hand, there is low political trust, but on the other hand there can be mutual benefit in technical cooperation and data sharing, flood forecasting and glaciers monitoring. It is also important to undertake a water diplomacy with Afghanistan regionally taking into account the fact that Afghanistan has outlined some dams on river Kabul that flows in the Indus system.

The adaptation to climate change should be part of the national security strategy of Pakistan taken into consideration across all aspects. Water security is an aspect that the military, which is the most organized state actor in many cases, must include on their list of security threats, and the civilian governments must consider climate resilience as an issue not to be politicized. Community mobilization can also be conducted through public awareness campaigns and water theft and over-extraction can be dealt with using legal reforms.

To sum up, water scarcity cannot be a problem that Pakistan is willing to address in the future. Climate change is causing it to move beyond slow-moving crisis to a present security problem. It is an unambiguous decision that Pakistan must make; whether it should initiate steps now to develop resilience or wait until water becomes the second battlefield. Limited water supply per capita means that any delay is practically tantamount to death.