Water bankruptcy

The world is entering what the UN starkly describes as an "era of water bankruptcy" — a moment when humanity has exhausted not just the annual flow of renewable water, but also the long-stored reserves in aquifers and glaciers. For Pakistan, a country already hovering near absolute water scarcity, this warning is immediate. It is a diagnosis of our present and a forecast of a perilous future.

The UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health's latest report claims that water systems in many regions are already in a post-crisis state of failure, depleted by decades of over-extraction, pollution, land degradation and deforestation — pressures now intensified by climate change. Rivers no longer reach the sea, aquifers are pumped until land subsides, salt intrudes into freshwater, and cities repeatedly flirt with "day zero".

Pakistan's vulnerability to these factors is acute. Per capita water availability has plunged from abundance at independence to near-scarcity today. Groundwater is being mined at unsustainable rates, particularly in Punjab and Sindh, where water-intensive cropping patterns and unchecked tube-well extraction have driven chronic declines in water tables. Urbanisation has compounded the problem, sealing recharge zones under concrete while demand soars.

Meanwhile, pollution from untreated sewage and industrial effluents has rendered large fractions of surface and groundwater unsafe for use, shrinking our already limited supply. The Indus Basin, the backbone of Pakistan's food security, is increasingly over-promised and under-protected.

What is required now is the "honest, science-based adaptation", urges the UN. This means rethinking crop choices and modernising irrigation to start with. Then, enforcing groundwater regulation and treating wastewater as a resource rather than refuse becomes essential components of combating this crisis. Water bankruptcy is not a metaphor Pakistan can afford to ignore.