Shangri-La is in trouble.
According to an article by Stephen Faris in Foreign Policy and the IPCC, the Himalayan glacier in the Kashmir province that provides 90 percent of Pakistan’s water for agricultural irrigation will disappear by 2035 as a consequence of climate change.
Appropriately titled “The Last Straw,” the article reviews water conflicts exacerbated by climate change in general while focusing on Pakistan’s unsustainable dependence on Kashmiri waters – a dependence that only exacerbates the long-standing historical, cultural, and religious animosity between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir territory.
Faris reports that a shocking “ninety percent of Pakistan’s agricultural irrigation depends on rivers that originate in Kashmir.” This water comes from three of the six tributaries that India and Pakistan split in their 1960 Indus Waters Treaty. Is the treaty’s continued existence a testament to how future resource shortages will draw normally hostile states into cooperating? Perhaps – the agreement has so far survived three major wars and nearly 50 years of hostile exchanges.
Unfortunately, the treaty’s stability depends on a status quo that no longer exists. By diminishing water flows in the Indus Valley, climate change puts the treaty – and the current tentative peace between Pakistan and India – at risk of collapsing.
Climate change disrupts the natural regulation of the Himalayan glaciers that feed into Kashmir’s waters: by preventing precipitation from freezing in the winter, climate change disrupts the summer melts and prevents farmers from getting adequate water for irrigation during the growing season. In fact, “the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates the glaciers could be mostly gone from the mountains by 2035.”
The effects are already serious, according to research by the NGO ActionAid discussed by Faris in “The Last Straw”:
In the valley, snow rarely falls and almost never sticks. The summertime levels of streams, rivers, springs, and ponds have dropped. In February 2007, melting snow combined with unseasonably heavy rainfall to undermine the mountain slopes; landslides buried the national highway—the region’s only land connection with the rest of India—for 12 days.
While the United States regulates the Rocky Mountains’ complex cyclical water flows with a series of dams, an infrastructure-based solution remains unrealistic for Kashmiri waters because the province is so disputed. If Pakistan and India co-develop and share a dam, the infrastructure could be used as a weapon during a flare-up of hostilities. One or both of the countries could try to induce flooding or block essential waterflows; meanwhile, neither side is likely to cede their land claims anytime soon.
However, climate change might just be the external threat that forces these nations to settle their Kashmir dispute. The food shortages and water scarcity crises that will soon already plague much of the planet (as predicted by top US intelligence analyst Thomas Fingar) could feasibly force both developing and developed countries, and Pakistan and India specifically, into constructive and cooperative agreements. By necessity, nations will need to work together or collapse under the weight of climate-based resource burdens – this is the future of foreign policy realism.
If cooperation fails to occur over Kashmir, then what happens next? Pakistan won’t just ignore the water flow issues – the government already dedicates thousands of troops to guard Pakistan’s limited wheat supplies, made scarce by (you guessed it) water shortages. And though Pakistan’s democratic institutions remain questionable, grain and water were in fact contentious election issues in 2008. The problem is not going away.
Pakistan, particularly, has a long history of state-sponsored low-intensity conflict in Kashmir, and this will likely continue in some form. Beyond that, any escalation in the region is purely speculative: especially considering that each side possesses nuclear arms, who can predict how the established political and social intensity of the Kashmir issue – incredible as it already is – will interact with the addition of mass water and agriculture shortages? Hopefully, no one will have to.
It’s easy in the West to get so distraught by the effects of climate change in our home countries and so distracted by our domestic policy battles that we often skip over how climate change could simply drive two nuclear powers to war. “The Last Straw” ends on a common-sense note: “If the rivers of Kashmir have the potential to plunge South Asia into chaos, the most effective response might be to do our best to ensure the glaciers never melt at all.”
Preventing outrageous levels of warming “might be” the most effective response? Clearly, we don’t have any constructive alternatives.
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Diminishing agricultural water use by 90% in 25 years is a shocking change. People (and their countries) do stupid things when they don’t have any food.
Instability and panic that might cause conflict between Pakistanis and Indians, I wonder how much of the world’s precious total growth and wealth will be stunted by such a development. Toss Bangladesh in there and you will have decades of lost development and general welfare. There is no real economic responsibility or intellectual skepticism among the people roaring about ACES simply because it isn’t the most perfectiest bill in US history. They just hate the idea of people they feel are too left-wing actually getting something done and shamelessly acting on blasphemous thinking (corporations not being perfectly rational? Anathema!).
Kastanj,
I don’t believe that the people opposing ACES are opposing it are engaging in some sort of left-wing litmus test. They are genuinely concerned about the fate of the earth’s climate and its implications for humanity. Many of these people are young people who will experience these hardships in the prime of their lives.
Let’s face some facts. The bill as written is very weak and everyone from Paul Krugman in yesterday’s New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/ 2009/ 07/ 13/ opinion/ 13krugman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion to Joe Romm knows this. Its sad that this is the only game in town. ACES does lay down the ground work that must be built on and it must get stronger. Absent that I don’t know what will curb our ravenous appetite for fossil fuels.
2035 is when the tap runs dry
But every year from now until 2035 the tap gets a little tighter.
They have water shortages now and every year as the melt water flow slows, the water shortages will increase.
The disaster point will be reached in much less than 25 years.
When it comes to water desperate behaviour is on the books….
India prays for rain as water wars break out
http://www.guardian.co.uk/ world/ 2009/ jul/ 12/ india-water-supply-bhopal
The monsoon is late, the wells are running dry and in the teeming city of Bhopal, water supply is now a deadly issue. Gethin Chamberlain reports
In Bhopal, and across much of northern India, a late monsoon and the driest June for 83 years are exacerbating the effects of a widespread drought and setting neighbour against neighbour in a desperate fight for survival.
India’s vast farming economy is on the verge of crisis.
We may be on the verge of one of those climactic Pearl Harbors that Joe is talking about.
IMHO, this is the most likely place for a nuclear war to occur over the next couple of decades.
As mentioned, virtually all of Pakistan’s water is glacier or snowpack fed. Pakistan doesn’t get alot of rain, virtually all of its agriculture is irrigated. The agreement it has with India for the source rivers gives India certain amounts of flow from those rivers (not percentages, but actual flow rates that don’t decline as the rivers shrink – as nobody was thinking they’d shrink back when it was signed). India is already dry and projected to get more dry as it adds a billion more mouths to feed over the next couple of decades. The situation couldn’t have been designed to create more conflict.