Pakistan is running out of water so fast that the shortage will strangulate all water-based economic activity by 2015, a Pakistani thinktank says.  And that pretty much covers 70 percent of the population  who are involved in farming.

This is not a new warning.  In recent months,  as this blog itself has noted, experts have painted an increasingly bleak scenario of Pakistan’s rivers drying up, the ground water polluted and over-exploited and the whole water infrastructure in a shambles.

But Pakistan, as the Islamabad-based Centre for Research and Security Studies says, is not listening.  Pakistan has gone from a “water scarce” country to a “water-stressed” country, worse than Ethiopia, the Centre says quoting a  2006 World Bank study. In 10 years time, it will become a water-famine country.  

Among the 25 most populous countries, South Africa, Egypt and Pakistan are the most water-limited nations, that study said.

According to the World Bank data, Pakistan only stores 30 days of river water, India stores 120 days, while the Colorado river system in the U.S. has storage capacity of up to 900 days of water usage.

The depletion of water resources is unchecked, as the 2009 UN World Water Development Report points out. It says that the total actual renewable water resources in Pakistan decreased from 2,961 cubic metres per capita in 2000 to 1,420 cubic metres in 2005. A more recent study indicates an available supply of water of little more than 1,000 cubic metres per person. 

India and China are not far behind in this plunder of water, with only 1,600 and 2100 cubic metres per person per year. Which as the South Asia  Investor Review points out is itself cause for serious concern, as it raises the spectre of wars over water in the future.

Just to put the numbers in relation to that for the rest of the world, major European countries have up to twice as much renewable water resources per capita, ranging from 2,300 (Germany) to 3,000 (France) cubic metres per person per year.

The United States, on the other hand, has far greater renewable water resources than China, India or major European countries: 9,800 cubic meters per person per year. By far the largest renewable water resources are reported from Brazil and the Russian Federation - with 31,900 and 42,500 cubic meters per person per year.

How did it get here? Pakistan is one of the world’s most arid countries, with an average rainfall of under 240 mm a year as this detailed backgrounder in Pakistan’s Daily Times points out.

The population and the economy are heavily dependent on an annual influx into the Indus river system (including the Indus, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej rivers) of about 180 billion cubic meters of water, that emanates from India and is mostly derived from snow-melt in the Himalayas.

But this single river system on which Pakistan almost entirely relies has been heavily harvested and there is no additional water to be injected into system.

Paksitan needs to conserve its water, use it more wisely and set up new reservoirs on an urgent basis, the South Asia Investor says. Or else the threat posed to the nation’s stability by the battle for water may yet turn out be just as serious as the militants trying to take control. 

[Photographs of dried up lake in Islamabad and a well in Baluchistan]

If Pakistan is to dig itself out of its current crisis it needs two things to happen.  It needs strong economic growth to tackle poverty and undercut the appeal of hardline Islamists; and it needs peace with India if it is to permanently cut its ties with militants it has traditionally seen as a reserve force to be used against its much bigger neighbour.  Or so goes the prevailing view.

This week’s United Nations report on pollution in Asia — and the melting of glaciers which feed the rivers of India and Pakistan — suggest there are serious risks to that scenario of an ultimately prosperous Pakistan at peace with its neighbours. In other words, can it achieve the economic growth it needs without worsening pollution further? And can it make peace with India if the two countries end up at loggerheads over dwindling supplies of water?

According to the U.N. report (see full pdf document here), thick clouds of brown soot and other pollutants are hanging over Asia, darkening cities, disrupting the monsoon and accelerating the melting of the mountain glaciers. These atmospheric brown clouds exacerbate the effect of global warming by depositing soot on the glaciers, which captures more solar heat than white snow and ice. ”If the current rate of retreat continues unabated, these glaciers and snow packs are expected to shrink by as much as 75 percent before the year 2050, posing grave danger to the region’s water security,” it says. (more…)

Defence analysts in South Asia have been saying for so long that India and Pakistan might solve their problems over Kashmir only to end up at war over water that I had almost become inured to the issue. That was until I read the following comment on an earlier blog about Gulf investors buying up farmland in Pakistan to offset food shortages at home:

“Tough challenges await the investors in this sector due to serious water and energy shortages that the country suffers from at the moment,” it reads. “For effective investment in the agriculture sector, the government must clear these impediments first.”

The comment prompted me to hunt around for evidence of growing tension between India and Pakistan over water, needed to irrigate the land to cope with food shortages and for hydroelectric power — an increasingly attractive alternative in view of high fuel prices.

A quick trawl turned up this overview in the asia sentinel: “Water is destined to be a determining factor in the regional conflicts of South Asia in the years to come, particularly between India and Pakistan,” it says. ”While the West is busy concentrating its efforts on securing a ready supply of oil, in South Asia the governments are slowly but surely waking up to the fact that in the not too distant future water is going to be equally, if not more, important to the survival of their people.”

More specifically, Ijaz Hussain in the Daily Times analyses a row between India and Pakistan over Indian plans to build a hydroelectric project – the Kishanganga dam — on a river on its side of divided Kashmir. Pakistan fears the project will disrupt its own plans to build a hydroelectric dam on the same river on its side of Kashmir.

India and Pakistan have successfully regulated their use of the rivers they share in divided Kashmir through the Indus Waters Treaty  (see full pdf document here), signed in 1960 under the auspices of the World Bank. It is the only agreement to have been fully implemented by India and Pakistan; it held through two full-scale wars in 1965 and 1971 and survived a period of intense antagonism which began with the nuclear tests in 1998 and ended with a ceasefire on the Line of Control dividing Kashmir in late 2003. 

How well will it hold up in the current global crisis over food shortages and high oil prices? Relations between India and Pakistan are better than they have been for years, yet the challenges they face in providing food and electricity for their people and their industries are greater than ever.

I shall return to this subject and would appreciate comments offering links or ideas about how far water is going to replace Kashmir as the main irritant between India and Pakistan.

In the meantime, here is an observation to be going on with. The Stimson Center, in a history of the Indus Waters Treaty, attributes the success of the World Bank in brokering the deal to its insistence that the “functional” aspects of sharing water resources for mutual benefit must be separated from the political aspects of the India-Pakistan relationship.

Yet when Indian Power Minister Jairam Ramesh spoke of the row over the Kishanganga dam earlier this month he said: ”This is an issue with geo-strategic and foreign policy implications. The prime minister would have to give it a thought.”

Did he misspeak? Or were his words about the geo-strategic implications of water a sign of things to come?