Expert warns of cataclysmic floods

While Pakistan is in the grips of the worst water crisis on record, a conservation expert has warned that the country is set to face an even more devastating phenomenon when the wet season returns. Overgrazing and the resultant loss of alpine pastures means that floods, worse than those that ravaged northern Pakistan in 1992, are a virtual certainty, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) conservationist Richard Garstang told IRIN. “I am going to make a terrible prediction, but I am afraid it’s going to happen. During the current extended drought cycle, the degree to which the alpine pastures have been hammered by livestock from various origins, including refugee communities, has resulted in a loss of ground cover. When the wet cycle returns - which it will - we will see flash flooding, very destructive floods, landslides and loss of life. This is a certainty,” Garstang said. In September 1992, Azad Kashmir and parts of the North-West Frontier Province [NWFP] were devastated by what was called “the worst flood disaster of the century”. More than 2,000 people were reported killed, roads and bridges wiped out, houses washed away and crops, particularly cotton, all but ruined. The intensity of the rainfall was the highest ever recorded in the subcontinent, according to the then UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs. Garstang warns that the potential impact of renewed floods would be “far more devastating” the next time round as the capacity of the land to hold water has been greatly diminished. “The only reason why nothing has happened so far is there hasn’t been any water. However, it will happen, probably within the next four years as we see things get progressively wetter. There is no recognition out there of this. We see hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on plans to contain floods downstream. But that’s treating the symptoms, it’s not treating the cause,” he said. The causes are numerous. Garstang said the depletion of ancient aquifers was particularly disturbing. There are populations of refugees and residents in Baluchistan who are using fossil water - “water that is tens of thousands of years old, and it will not be replaced in our lifetime”. Despite this water being finite, those who live in the vicinity of Baluchistan have no other options - there are no rivers, there is no water on the surface. The indirect problem, according to Garstang, is overgrazing. He refers to the natural system that has evolved, which allows the forests and alpine pastures to retain water and prevent surface runoff. “What we have is a situation where we have forests up to a certain level and then alpine pastures above them, and the snowcap on top. The clouds come along and a disproportionate amount of water is dropped on the hill slopes that face the prevailing wind - as is the case with the Himalayas, and the reason why Murree [in northeastern Pakistan] is so green.” The system retards the rate at which the water runs off, and water permeates down and recharges the underground aquifer. Overgrazing, exacerbated during the current dry spell, has largely destroyed this process. Garstang uses the example of the Uchali lakes in the Salt Range, which lie between the valleys of the Indus and Jhelum rivers, in the northern part of the Punjab Province. The rate of siltation in these lakes has gone up dramatically in the last couple of decades, to the point that the lakes are actually disappearing. They have filled up with silt, because overgrazing has meant there are no plants to bind the soil. The soil in turn has washed off the slopes, causing ecological degradation and making the mountain-sides less likely to support vegetation in future. “All the silt accumulates and fills up the hollows that store the water. Now the water just runs off the top and down the rivers, and is unusable to the people in that environment. It has made the Uchali area into a semi-desert.” Sadly, Garstang said, the whole mechanism is being destroyed. “The water rushes down the mountains, tearing out and knocking down the forests, knocks down the bridges, fills up the dams, it’s just a catastrophic cycle. We estimate that about 90 million people depend on the Indus river system - that’s two-thirds of the people in Pakistan dependant on the life of a river which is being assailed from all sorts of angles at the moment.” Garstang said a very sensitive cycle exists in the alpine areas. Central to the cycle is the relationship between the wild animals and the alpine vegetation, which have been coexisting together for millions of years. The wild animals take a lot from the fragile ecosystem, but they also put a lot back - they redistribute seeds so trees can regenerate, he said. But the pressures of subsistence hunting are removing the wild animals from the chain and directly affecting vegetation levels. “As a result, vegetation starts to go down, the livestock goes down, and to make it worse the snow leopard starts to prey on the livestock, which adversely affects the survival of human beings. The whole cycle starts to wind down, because the natural vegetation without the wild animals starts to fail as well,” Garstang said. This downward spiral is being seen over and again in the alpine areas. “It affects everything. Come the next wet period, this will manifest itself as massive runoff, flash-floods, life-threatening floods that will damage in the short term and the long term,” he stressed. Pollution, too, has a major impact. The Ravi river, one of the main tributaries of the Indus, is “stone dead and polluted to the point that it doesn’t support life for a couple of kilometres in the vicinity of Lahore”, the conservation expert maintains . “If you look at the population growth rate in Pakistan - Lahore was one million about 50 years ago, it is 6.5 million today. Faisalabad has gone from 1.5 million to 5.5 million in 50 years. It is simply unsustainable... At the same time, the rate of water use per person in the population has doubled in the last 100 years. We have seen a six-fold increase per person in the amount of water consumed.” Garstang points out that good laws do exist in Pakistan, which should help prevent the misuse of natural resources. However, it is in enforcing the laws where the country falls down. Pakistan has more than 11 percent of its surface area set aside as protected areas, national parks, wildlife sanctuaries and game reserves, which exceeds the world norm by more than double. “Such would be a wonderful thing - except that none of the protected areas are protected - only on paper. There is no enforcement of the law, no application of the law whatsoever, except one or two parks - less than half a percent perhaps. The same as the sewerage plants - they are paper sewerage plants. If they exist, they don’t function, but mostly they do not exist at all.” WWF has for many years been working on efforts to save the endangered Indus dolphin - one of only five river dolphin species left on earth. This “ecological rarity” is a strong indicator of the condition of Pakistan’s waterways. “The fact is the water is in very bad shape. This dolphin used to occur in all of the tributaries. Now it only occurs in the main stem of the Indus. This is an indication of the failing ecology of the river system,” Garstang laments.