Water wars imminent?

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.

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 will aggravate the situation in the region.

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.

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, says research by ActionAid.

Do you believe climate change is a distant thing? What should developing nations do?