Flood waters on the Indus at Kotri, barrage 19 August 2010
Source: NASA Earth Observatory
The Pakistan floods came just after I collected material on the problems of water supply in that predominantly arid country. The plan was to discuss Pakistan's problems resulting from a growing demand for water in the face of a diminishing supply. Instead of suffering from the problems of drought, in 2010 Pakistan was inundated by record rainfall with the Indus and its various tributaries flooding much of its best agricultural land, washing away crops and soil in productive agricultural areas and drowning parts of several large urban places and countless towns and villages. The lives of millions were disrupted, and the wet season crops of 2010 will be a small fraction of the expected yields in some of the more productive farming areas as flooding washed soil and growing crops off the fields and devastated irrigation facilities.
The flooding has now subsided, and post-flood recovery in Pakistan is largely absent from the world's news media. Today's (30 October) Guardian newspaper from Britain has a fine piece on the problems of recovery by Mohamed Hanif "Forgotten but not gone." Even as in the recent past the US has promised Pakistan's military about $2 billion in military aid, it is contributing a vastly smaller amount for food aid and reconstruction of infrastructure damaged and destroyed in the flooding. Yesterday the BBC reported "Pakistan Flood Food Running Out." With crops far below usually production, the country will need food supplies to carry it through to the next harvest. In addition a huge amount of resources will be needed to reconstruct houses, warehouses, transportation facilities, irrigation canals, and the other elements of life the flooding destroyed.
Discussions of a world water crisis rightly emphasize problems of water supply, and in most of the countries where a water crisis looms, the availability of adequate quantities of water is the key issue. With global climate change, some regions will be faced with additional rainfall and others will suffer from irregular and occasionally excessive precipitation - likely to be the case in much of the Indian subcontinent. A not inconsiderable portion of the subtropics may face wild fluctuations in precipitation year to year. They may then have occasional years like 2010 in Pakistan with damaging and dangerous flooding followed by numerous years with precipitation inadequate to meet basic water needs.
