Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [20]
Chronic over-use, however, means that many of the natural springs have dried up, and the water table is dropping so rapidly in many areas that the tube-wells will also eventually follow them into extinction. That will leave the Indus once again; and in the furore surrounding the debunking of the exaggerated claim that the glaciers feeding the Indus will disappear by 2035, it has been forgotten that they are nonetheless melting; and if they disappear a century or two later, the effects on Pakistan will be equally dire, if no serious action is taken in the meantime radically to improve Pakistan’s conservation and efficient use of water.
If the floods of 2010 are a harbinger of a long-term pattern of increased monsoon rains, this on the other hand would potentially be of great benefit to Pakistan – but only potentially, because to harness them for agriculture requires both a vastly improved storage and distribution infrastructure, and radical measures to stop deforestation in the mountains and to replant deforested areas. Otherwise, increased rainfall will risk more catastrophes like that of 2010, with the water rushing off the deforested hillsides in the north to swamp first the valleys and then the plains. It should be added, though, that an absolutely 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 toll 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 all 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 will 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 challenge. And here delay is fatal, because the longer it takes to develop such actions, the greater will 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 billion cubic metres (bcm) – while, unless radical action is taken, Pakistan’s water availability will be around the same as at present, at 236 bcm. The resulting shortfall of 100 bcm would be two-thirds of the entire present