How does a country with 7200 glaciers run out of water?

5. “Climate Change, duh?” is unfortunately not the right answer. (Reading time: 9 mins)

Hunza Valley in Pakistan. Photo by Mehtab Farooq on Unsplash

If you’re like me following the news, the recent devastating flooding in Pakistan with a tragic loss of over 1700 lives made me curious about what is in store for climate change. After all, 230 million people live there. Going down this rabbit hole was… infuriating. And now you get to feel it too. Buckle up for a story of abundance, wastage, and, ultimately, sorrow.

I knew about the north and the south poles with vast amounts of ice, but I recently learned geographers refer to a third pole. This is a region nestled in the Himalayan range. One country in this region has far more glaciers, 7253 - than anywhere else on earth.

Welcome to Pakistan. The ultimate water paradox.

With glaciers, seasonal rains and Himalayan rivers, Pakistan is rich in freshwater. In fact, Pakistan ranks in the top 25% countries with the most renewable freshwater. Yet…

Pakistan will run out of water by 2025.

For a water-rich nation, climate change causing flooding at least made some sense to me. But I also saw a bunch of headlines that barely made sense. Did Pakistan’s water woes start much before climate change was ever on our collective radar? But... let me just double check with my trusted friend, Our World In Data.

Pakistan has extracted more water than it should, compared to any other nation.

Well, S#%T.

What do we see here? This chart shows how much freshwater Pakistan extracts, compared to how much it can afford to. For comparison, I have included the data for other large nations from both the developing and developed world.

I found that Pakistan’s bonkers water usage is not a bug, but a feature. The floods mask the ironic nature of the real problem: Pakistan’s woes are not due to water, but the lack of it. Studies project to it running out of usable water within three years.

How did we get to this point? “Anthropogenic climate change” is what you will answer. If I didn't dig into the details, I'd have too. The floods have made the frenzied news coverage showing climate change as a monolithic issue. They pay little attention to other factors that will make the problem infinitely worse than what it should have been.

For a country teetering on water collapse, Pakistan has the fourth highest per capita water usage in the world. If this isn’t illuminating enough, there is an even better metric: water usage per unit of GDP, which is a smart way to express if a country’s increased water usage benefits its GDP, or is just being wasted.

Pakistan has the highest water usage per unit of GDP. Translation: For every dollar Pakistan earns, it wastes far more water than any nation on earth. This has some serious impacts today, before we can even think of a tomorrow, as…

… 80% of Pakistan has no access to clean drinking water.

Most of Pakistan’s water comes from the Himalayas in various forms. In addition, it also has large underground water aquifers and several freshwater lakes. Still, 184 million people already lack access to clean water. Today.

In the chart, see that bump in the mid-1990s? There is a big spike in water usage from 275% to 375%. That is precisely the moment in history that the Pakistani population saw explosive growth. Add to this an institutional tradition of water wastage that never changed, the densely populated urban areas were the first to be hammered with shortage. People responded with large-scale extraction of groundwater from underground aquifers¹ .Unfortunately, aquifers are non-renewable water sources, and they are fast running out.

Of 60 freshwater lakes in Pakistan, most are heavily polluted, making them unusable². Barring a few exceptions, this leaves the Indus river system that runs through the Pakistani heartland as the last viable water source.

Thankfully, Pakistan has built the world’s largest network of canals to bring water all over the country, starting in the 1960s. But since so many people are struggling to find water…. I wondered… where, oh where, does all the water go?

90% of Pakistan’s water goes to agriculture…

…And they waste more than they use. Exact numbers are not forthcoming, but estimates put it at an insane 60%. Water canals and pipeline frequently leak, and maintenance is not a priority. Rice and sugarcane are the primary crops, but water-hungry³.

There are two major reasons for this:

1) Agriculture has been grossly under-funded and historically ignored:

• Water is fed from canals and borewells that bring up groundwater. Farmers let the water runoff from fields after flooding them: an old practice that is wasteful, erodes the topsoil, and dumps toxic fertilizers into the water cycle.

• Pakistan’s farmers have a poor literacy rate and lack the know-how to adopt on modern irrigation techniques. In fact, studies have shown that farmer education has an outsized impact on increased yield and farm efficiency.

• Farmers are too poor to buy to newly developed, water-efficient seeds from the international market⁴.

• Farmers have difficulty affording imported (and expensive) fertilizer, so they cultivate more land (and hence use more water) to get higher crop yields.

• Most countries provide low-interest loans to farmers for agricultural modernization, but Pakistan never did it consistently enough on a large scale.

Because of such institutional neglect, Pakistan’s average yields are 50- 80% lower than international standards.

2) Lack of enough water storage:

Water-rich Pakistan has little capacity to store it because of a lack of dams. Pakistan’s reservoirs can currently store water for just 30 days. In comparison, neighboring India can store for 190 days while the United States can store for 900 days.

Inefficiency in one resource almost always leads to inefficiency in another related resource. When yields are low and demand is high, the oldest trick in the farming playbook is to just cultivate more land. Intense media coverage on the Amazon gives us the impression that destroying forests for farms is a distinctly Brazilian specialty, but Pakistan has long been asking you to hold its beer. Losing its forests at a brisk pace of 2% per year, Pakistan set to lose ALL of its forests in 25 years. The situation is so bad that some call it the “Green emergency”.

At this point, you will have the same question that I had:

Anytime you are using multi-hundred percentage points of any resource, alarm bells should ring in the highest offices of the land. Is there, perchance, a government of some sort? You know, the kind that needs to figure out existential crises before they happen?

Pakistani Democracy: Game of Thrones

Technically, Pakistan is a democratic parliamentary republic.

Technically.

Since its independence from the British, Pakistan has suffered 3 military coups. Power has swung between the military and civilian government almost every other decade of its existence.

Sometimes a civilian government sees the light of the day: But of the 23 Prime Ministers, not one has completed their democratically elected term in 75 years of Pakistan’s history. Every PM has been either removed, exiled⁵ or assassinated.

With the perpetual chaos of who gets to rule the country being a big distraction, Pakistan adopted, let’s just call it, an adventurous approach to its finances. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has bailed out Pakistan 22 times on defaulted loans⁶.

So… the short answer to our question? Corruption.

Still, describing the Pakistani ruling elite as “corrupt” is like calling a daily lunch of deep-fried butter sticks covered with corn syrup and a side of French fries as “not ideal for health”⁷.

Let me do better.

Imagine you have ignored an annoying toothache for far too long. Now, that searing pain from hell makes you realize you need an extraction ASAP. You rush to the dentist. Even pay the fees upfront. The nice reception lady politely escorts you to the dentist’s chair. I’ll leave here a free man, you think. Except there’s no dentist. For the next 3 hours, she shows you a PowerPoint presentation of “The importance of brushing your teeth”, complete with janky slideshow animations from the 1990s. She even throws in some Wingdings fonts, just in case you didn’t get the implicit message: You don’t matter, and neither does your pain. Now you get an idea of how average Pakistanis have felt, especially so in 2019.

The dam that never was…

In 2018, a newly elected Supreme Court judge started a crowdsourcing campaign to build a dam on the Indus river. It resonated. Middle class folks donated. Soldiers gave up their paychecks. Top musicians pitched in. Even the national cricket team did its part. With momentum rising, the Pakistani government took over. Pakistani embassies worldwide issued a call for donations. For a moment in time, the dam became a symbol of not just frustration, but also the resurgent optimism that bubbles when you take matters into your own hands.

“Dam Fund” or “Talking about Dam” fund? Generous donations are sought while we figure this out.

They raised $40 million (USD). But In 2019, there were no signs of construction. People started asking questions. The government responded, along with the fine judge, who started it all.

They had spent the money.

On advertising.

To quote the judge:

“We wanted to create awareness and make people understand how important it is…..” “…This money was never intended to be used 100% for building”

They claimed they were almost $6 billion short of what they needed to build the dam. No money, no dam. But so long, and thanks for all the cash⁸. Because, after all, it takes a lot of money to convince a thirsty man that he needs water.

Meanwhile, during the two-year saga, Pakistan spent around $22 billion on its military.

Conclusion

After going down this rabbit hole, I ask myself: Does this look like a climate change problem?

As calamity strikes, it is becoming far too easy for politicians to throw their hands up in the air with the “Oh no, climate change” defense to hide their failures. And we meekly nod our heads and take solace that hey, they could’ve been a climate deniers, but they’re not. So kudos? In my experience, popular media coverage of the climate crisis embraces this sentiment. We unwittingly become enablers for those using science as an excuse for corruption, incompetence and mismanagement.

Water wastage in Pakistan is unlikely to get better soon. Massive improvements in agricultural policy and water management take decades of effort and long-term vision⁹. Executing this demands a sort of political stability Pakistan has never seen. Amongst climate change watchers, I’m usually the hopeful one.

But in this case, hope is hard to find. If you do, let me know why.

Thank you for reading Climatonomics. Please leave a comment with your thoughts, and subscribe and share with your friends if you find this useful! As a young publication, I would greatly appreciate your encouragement.

Data Source: Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2017) - "Water Use and Stress". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/water-use-stress' [Online Resource]

1. Most of this is done with thousands of polluting, poor efficiency diesel pumps, which is a problem on its own.

2. This includes the Manchar lake, one of Asia’s largest freshwater lakes.

3. With large export markets and a massive population that is growing, the problem is not these crops, but how they are grown: The crops in Pakistan use twice as much water per kilogram of yield, compared to India, China and other Asian countries.

4. One of the hallmark of the post world war two period was intensive scientific investment to increase yields. Pakistan did not invest in domestic R&D, which would have made them much cheaper, making it an outlier amongst even other developing countries.

5. Often in London or Dubai, under far more opulent circumstances than the people they governed back home. So don’t feel too bad for them.

6. For a nuclear-capable country, foreign aid appears to be one of the primary goals of state diplomacy, particularly from China.

7. Yes. It exists. Don’t ask me how I know.

8. With apologies to Douglas Adams.

9. India and China are excellent examples, in the same neighborhood. Both the nations a are polar opposites in governance models (democracy and communism), but had the political stability to execute strategic 20-30 year plans to increase crop yields for their growing populations, with lesser water and improved land use.