essential part of existing infrastructure did work during the floods: the great barrages along the Indus and its tributaries. If these had broken, several of Pakistan’s greatest cities would have been inundated, and the death tol would have been vastly higher than the 1,900 who lost their lives.
This dependence on the Indus is the greatest source of long-term danger to Pakistan. Over the next century, the possible long-term combination of climate change, acute water shortages, poor water infrastructure and steep population growth has the potential to wreck Pakistan as an organized state and society. Long-term international aid projects in Pakistan should be devoted above al to reducing this mortal threat, by promoting reforestation, repairing irrigation systems and even more importantly improving the efficiency of water use.
Human beings can survive for centuries without democracy, and even without much security. They cannot live for more than three days without water.
The extent of the water crisis that is already occurring wil be described in the chapters on Sindh and Balochistan. As two of the authors of the World Bank’s very worrying 2004 report on Pakistan’s water situation write:
The facts are stark. Pakistan is already one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, a situation that is going to degrade into outright water scarcity due to high population growth. There is no feasible intervention which would enable Pakistan to mobilize appreciably more water than it now uses ...
There are no additional water resources to be exploited and agricultural water use must decline to enable adequate flows into the degrading Indus River Delta. Pakistan’s dependence on a single river system makes its water economy highly risky ...
Groundwater is now being overexploited in many areas, and its quality is declining ... There is little evidence that government (or donors, including the World Bank) have re-engineered their capacity and funding to deal with this great chal enge. And here delay is fatal, because the longer it takes to develop such actions, the greater wil become the depth [beneath the earth] of the water table.17
According to a 2009 study by the Woodrow Wilson Center drawing on a range of different works, by 2025 population growth is likely to mean that Pakistan’s annual water demand rises to 338 bil ion cubic metres (bcm) – while, unless radical action is taken, Pakistan’s water availability wil be around the same as at present, at 236 bcm. The resulting shortfal of 100 bcm would be two-thirds of the entire present flow of the Indus.18
And this frightening situation would have come about even before the potential effects of climate change begin to kick in. These effects could be to turn stress into catastrophe by the end of the twenty-first century. Wel before Pakistan reaches this point, however, it is likely that conflict over access to the shrinking Indus wil have raised tensions between Pakistan’s provinces to levels which wil be incompatible with the country’s survival.
If anyone thinks that the condition of Pakistan wil be of little consequence to the rest of the world in the long run, they should remember that a hundred years from now, if it survives that long, Pakistan wil stil possess nuclear weapons, one of the biggest armies in the world, one of the biggest populations in the world and one of the biggest diasporas in the world, especial y in Britain. Islamist radicalism, which has already existed for hundreds of years, wil also stil be present, even if it has been considerably reduced by the West’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Al of this wil stil mean that of al the countries in the world that are acutely threatened by climate change, Pakistan wil be one of the most important. Moreover, what happens to Pakistan wil have a crucial effect on the rest of South Asia, where around one-fifth of the world’s entire population live and wil live. Those Indians who would be tempted
This dependence on the Indus is the greatest source of long-term danger to Pakistan. Over the next century, the possible long-term combination of climate change, acute water shortages, poor water infrastructure and steep population growth has the potential to wreck Pakistan as an organized state and society. Long-term international aid projects in Pakistan should be devoted above al to reducing this mortal threat, by promoting reforestation, repairing irrigation systems and even more importantly improving the efficiency of water use.
Human beings can survive for centuries without democracy, and even without much security. They cannot live for more than three days without water.
The extent of the water crisis that is already occurring wil be described in the chapters on Sindh and Balochistan. As two of the authors of the World Bank’s very worrying 2004 report on Pakistan’s water situation write:
The facts are stark. Pakistan is already one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, a situation that is going to degrade into outright water scarcity due to high population growth. There is no feasible intervention which would enable Pakistan to mobilize appreciably more water than it now uses ...
There are no additional water resources to be exploited and agricultural water use must decline to enable adequate flows into the degrading Indus River Delta. Pakistan’s dependence on a single river system makes its water economy highly risky ...
Groundwater is now being overexploited in many areas, and its quality is declining ... There is little evidence that government (or donors, including the World Bank) have re-engineered their capacity and funding to deal with this great chal enge. And here delay is fatal, because the longer it takes to develop such actions, the greater wil become the depth [beneath the earth] of the water table.17
According to a 2009 study by the Woodrow Wilson Center drawing on a range of different works, by 2025 population growth is likely to mean that Pakistan’s annual water demand rises to 338 bil ion cubic metres (bcm) – while, unless radical action is taken, Pakistan’s water availability wil be around the same as at present, at 236 bcm. The resulting shortfal of 100 bcm would be two-thirds of the entire present flow of the Indus.18
And this frightening situation would have come about even before the potential effects of climate change begin to kick in. These effects could be to turn stress into catastrophe by the end of the twenty-first century. Wel before Pakistan reaches this point, however, it is likely that conflict over access to the shrinking Indus wil have raised tensions between Pakistan’s provinces to levels which wil be incompatible with the country’s survival.
If anyone thinks that the condition of Pakistan wil be of little consequence to the rest of the world in the long run, they should remember that a hundred years from now, if it survives that long, Pakistan wil stil possess nuclear weapons, one of the biggest armies in the world, one of the biggest populations in the world and one of the biggest diasporas in the world, especial y in Britain. Islamist radicalism, which has already existed for hundreds of years, wil also stil be present, even if it has been considerably reduced by the West’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Al of this wil stil mean that of al the countries in the world that are acutely threatened by climate change, Pakistan wil be one of the most important. Moreover, what happens to Pakistan wil have a crucial effect on the rest of South Asia, where around one-fifth of the world’s entire population live and wil live. Those Indians who would be tempted
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