When it comes to the climate change debate, details about short-term developments -- like a spell of unusually hot or cold weather -- are often interposed with data on secular trends to create a confusing jumble that tells us little about where things actually stand.
In some respects, that calls to mind the question of whether Pakistan has a water problem when parts of the country are being wracked by the worst floods in years. Regardless of what is occuring now, that doesn't give us a great deal of insight into what will happen next.
In fact, as the Toronto Star reports in "Deadly Prospects for South Asia’s Politics of Water," the damage being caused by a surplus of water will eventually be more than offset by future shortages.
This may not be the most tactful time to bring it up, with much of Pakistan underwater and many millions homeless, but Pakistan’s real problem is not too much water. It is too little water — and one day it could cause a war.
The current disastrous floods (to which the response of both the Pakistan government and the international community has been far too slow) are due to this year’s monsoon being much stronger than usual. But that is just bad weather, in the end: every 50 or 100 years you can expect the weather to do something really extreme. It comes in various forms — blizzards, floods, hurricanes — but it happens everywhere.
The long-term threat to Pakistan’s well-being is that the country is gradually drying out. The Indus river system is the main year-round source of water for both Pakistan and northwestern India, but the glaciers up on the Tibetan plateau that feed the system’s various tributaries are melting.
While they are melting, of course, the amount of water in the system will not fall steeply — but according the Chinese Academy of Sciences, some of the glaciers will be gone in as little as 20 years. Then the river levels will drop permanently, and the real problems will begin.
When India and Pakistan got their independence from Britain in 1947, there was plenty of water in the Indus system for everyone. In fact, almost half the water was still flowing into the Arabian Sea unused. But the population has grown fast over the years, especially on the Pakistani side of the border — from 34 million in 1947 to 175 million now — and the amount of water in the rivers has not.
The per-capita supply of water in Pakistan has fallen from over 5,000 cubic metres (175,000 cu. ft.) annually in 1947 to only about 1,000 cubic metres (35,000 cu. ft.) today, a level defined by the United Nations as “high stress.” Ninety-six per cent of that goes to irrigation, and the Indus no longer reaches the sea in most years. That’s what has already happened, even before the melting of the glaciers has gone very far.
Fifteen or 20 years from now, the water shortage (and therefore also food scarcities) will be a permanent political obsession in Pakistan. Even now, Pakistani politicians tend to blame India for their country’s water shortage (and vice versa, of course). It will get worse when the shortage grows acute.
Comments