Water is not only indispensable to human life, but also to all life on the planet Earth. Though plentiful in quantity, as it covers at least 75 per cent of the earth’s surface, water that is safe to drink is getting increasingly scarce by the day. At the same time, the global demand for potable water has grown sharply as the world’s population hit eight billion in November 2022 and is counting. Historically, water has been a major source of conflicts between nations and at times the competition to have access to safe drinking water leads to violence. The bitter and deepening rivalry between Pakistan and India is the direct result of disputes over water. On the diplomatic front, Pakistan has always strived to honour the 1960 Indus Water Treaty on water apportionment between the two countries, but infrastructure projects started by New Delhi upstream rekindled the conflict and threatened the accord.
The unilateral and illegal actions by New Delhi in the occupied Jammu and Kashmir valley, which are mainly aimed at subjugating the Kashmiri people and occupying the water sources risked clash between the two nuclear armed countries. Although water scarcity in the Indus basin is often attributed to mismanagement, climate change also plays an important role this regard. The present day conflicts over availability of freshwater in the Middle East mainly stem from disputes over the waters of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers among Turkiye, Syria and Iraq, while the Jordan River dispute risks violence among Israel, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. In Africa, conflicts related to the Nile river have pitched Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan against one another. Being a responsible state, Pakistan over the decades has stressed the need for trans-boundary water cooperation as the world faces rising water scarcity.
“With most of world’s water resources, being shared between two or more countries, need for trans-boundary cooperation assumes even greater urgency,” said Pakistan’s delegate Senator Farooq Naek at the Annual Parliamentary Hearing, a joint initiative between the President of the United Nations General Assembly and the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU). Pakistani parliamentarians have warned the international community of the water-borne crisis in the country. They said that greater attention should be paid to enhance international cooperation to deal with the growing water crisis as global climate change has been increasingly impacting water availability, leading to water scarcity in some regions and flooding in others. Globally water stress levels remained safe at 18.6 per cent in 2019, South Asia registered high levels of water stress at over 75 per cent. The Pakistan delegation apprised the forum on the water related challenges and their remedies. “To overcome these challenges, we believe that there are three essential requirements: finance, technology transfer and enhanced international cooperation”, says head of the Pakistan delegation Zahid Akram Durrani, who is the deputy speaker of the National Assembly.
Apart from fueling conflicts, official statistics show that over two billion people lack the access to water that is fit for consumption. Contaminated water, which is a leading risk factor for infectious and water borne diseases, is responsible for more than 1.2 million deaths across the globe each year. There is a greater and urgent need for the comity of nations to join hands to overcome the scarcity of water, which has triggered conflicts and environmental degradation that lead to devastating impacts on human life and natural habitat in different regions. A deeper soul searching is surely going to resolve the water conflicts and secure the future of humanity.
