Pakistan’s transition from water-rich to water-stressed didn’t come without fair warning. At the turn of the ’90s, experts predicted that freshwater resources in the country would dwindle substantially and become scarce by 2005. The predicted ‘waterfall’ was confirmed by the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR), which further added that acute water shortage would follow by 2025 if the current situation was allowed to prevail.

Fahad Malik

The deadly drought that plagued Syria from 2007 to 2010 gives further context to that statement. Ancient irrigation technologies combined with water mismanagement have contributed significantly to the ongoing conflict in Syria, which has claimed thousands of lives and incurred millions in property damage. Widespread crop failures led to mass migration of families that relied solely on farming as their primary source of income.

The large-scale exodus of ‘water refugees’ to neighbouring Jordan and Sudan is stretching thin the host countries’ water resources as well. The influx of 600,000 refugees into Jordan, for instance, has caused ground water resources there to fall into sharp decline. Consequently, interpersonal dynamics between the natives and refugees are worsening steadily. Needless to say, in a region that faces conflict on several fronts, scarcity of water can drastically increase the likelihood of local skirmishes breaking out over control of the remaining resources.

Severe water shortages could presage armed conflict.

Although there are no parallels between war-torn Syria and terrorism in Pakistan, the water situation, on the other hand, is following the same predicted trajectory. Our water reserves are erratically disseminated at best. Punjab gets 55.94 million acre feet — the lion’s share of the overall water supply. Other provinces, Sindh in particular, accuse Punjab of leveraging its upstream position and controlling the water infrastructure to determine sharing on the basis of historic use.

The disproportionate distribution is cause for considerable tensions between the provinces. Attempts to initiate the construction of new dam projects to preserve water, as well as increase power output, have met an early demise in the past because a single, cohesive solution that benefited all stakeholders equally could not be mutually agreed upon.

Apart from interprovincial water disputes, experts often cite global warming as a phenomenon that is causing rapid depletion of our water resources. For a country heavily dependent on the annual monsoon rains and summer ice melt in the Himalayas to replenish its aquatic reserves, the effects of climate change are undeniable. However, that argument only takes into account one side of an extremely intricate water equation. Man-made interventions — or lack thereof — are as much to blame as Mother Nature retaliating to even the odds.

Take into account the crucial agriculture sector of our country. Being the primary driver of Pakistan’s economy, agriculture accounts for 20pc of Pakistan’s overall GDP and it is the livelihood of half its inhabitants. The Indus and its associated rivers and tributaries form the lifeline of the agrarian industry, which relies on the single largest contiguous irrigation system in the world. Despite that impressive feat, Pakistan’s crop yield per unit is among the lowest in the world — an alarming state of affairs considering that an astonishing 97pc of our water supply is made available to the agricultural sector alone.

However, due to reliance on obsolete irrigation practices and subpar delivery systems, two-thirds of surface water is lost to seepage and evaporation — water that could be harnessed to irrigate arid lands and exponentially increase crop yields. As a result, 29pc of the overall perfectly cultivatable land (or 22.6 million acres) remains uncultivated, which in turn affects national food security.

While the loss of water is causing the agricultural sector to spiral downwards, it has severe implications for the national economy as well. Once crops are lost due to drought, rifts begin to develop among the populace. The resulting social unrest is likely to aggravate the security situation if the country is already struggling to maintain peace. Add the interprovincial water dispute to the mix and the equation becomes increasingly hostile.

The current status quo is a result of political inaction and lack of funding for PCRWR to conduct water preservation studies. Unfortunately, if the threat of acute water shortage is prolonged any further it would grow to rival and surpass homegrown militancy in its potential to cause harm.

The writer is a researcher.
Twitter: @fahadamalik
Published in Dawn November 10th, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

Amidst all the turmoil, climate change is rapidly surfacing as an issue that eclipses all others in terms of its severity and sheer scale of impact. As part of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to reduce global warming, Pakistan was among 175 nations that resolved to mitigate the effects of climate change by becoming signatory to the historic Paris Agreement in April this year.

While the Earth Day signing represents a universal action plan to reduce global warming to below two degrees Celsius worldwide, countermeasures to achieve that goal need to be developed based on region-specific climatic challenges.

Pakistan’s contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions is relatively minuscule as compared to India’s and the manufacturing behemoth, China. As science would have it, unfortunately, toxicity expelled into the atmosphere by a single large-scale industrial nation disrupts conventional weather patterns of countries located in the vicinity that may not be directly responsible for those emissions — therefore worsening their own war with weather.

As a result of Chinese industries spilling their toxic guts into the atmosphere, a Nature study, conducted in 2010, analysed the constituents of the smog that engulfed major metropolises of China and identified it as the same hazardous smog that wafted over to Pakistan via springtime winds, spreading as far as western US. This cross-border spillage, coupled with our own rapidly increasing dependency on fossil fuels, alarming rate of deforestation and unmonitored carbon emissions have impacted our regional climate to the point that an unprecedented ecological disaster is imminent if effective measures are not taken.

The country is particularly vulnerable to climate change.

In spite of environmentalists’ concerns since the early 1990s, it was only after the destruction of lives and infrastructure in the 2005 earthquake that the government began to recognise that climate change may not simply be a surface-level issue — experts say that shifting water levels may also lead to seismic shifts. The 2010 super floods followed, ravaging lands, killing hundreds and displacing millions. At its height, the sheer scale of the floods could be observed from space, with the Indus stretching as far as 30 kilometres apart at certain points. These events combined claimed over 100,000 lives and caused billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure damage to a country already struggling to keep its economy afloat. In only five years, climate change anomalies shook a nation — that braves terrorism almost daily — to its core.

In the aftermath of the calamities’ disastrous footprint, advocacy group Germanwatch ranked Pakistan eighth in 2015 in the Global Climate Risk Index of countries most susceptible to climate change. Our climate change problem is an intricate one; several anomalies tie into each other to create climate volatility in our region.

Pakistan’s known glacial count, for instance, is 7,253 — the highest in the world — with 543 in the picturesque valley of Chitral alone. Central to our nation’s otherworldly beauty, our glaciers are melting at an exponential rate due to yearly soaring temperatures — every summer since 2010 has been the hottest in the country’s recorded history — thus disrupting volumetric flow in several important rivers.

As a result, the UN has predicted low-latitude glaciers in the Himalayan range to completely vanish by 2035, a small time frame in the global warming landscape. The colossal melting of ice will cause our rivers (primary source of 75pc of our water supply) to flood — at first causing an overabundance of water, and then receding at an even greater pace with no source left to replenish them, leaving famine in their wake.

Similarly, the illustrious real estate and timber industries have jointly claimed an astonishing 151,000 acres of forests in the country since its inception; making great progress, but reducing our forest cover to a paltry 1.9pc in the process — not to mention wiping away the essential first line of defence against floodwaters and carbon emissions. The same paradox applies to the influx of foreign investments in the country that requires the development of new infrastructure. While vital for our country’s economy to thrive, it is essential for the political machinery to take all necessary measures to contain the resulting air pollution that claims the lives of 30,000 children each year.

These causes and effects transform global warming from a simple case of malfunctioning weather to an all-encompassing problem that, if left unchecked, can inadvertently influence Pakistan’s existing social framework. The chain reaction could aggravate social inequalities such as resource consumption and food security, possibly leading to deadly conflict and further instability in water-scarce provinces like Balochistan.

Unless the establishment makes exploration of renewable energy sources a part of its prime directive, weather-related catastrophes will continue to mount. Sporadic afforestation initiatives must evolve into a nation-wide movement that accounts for life, land and livelihood — else our country runs the risk of being at Mother Nature’s mercy.

The writer is a researcher. His Twitter handle is @fahadamalik
Published in Dawn, September 21st, 2016

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan

THE rapid evolution of the internet has revealed avenues of learning that are challenging the traditional norms of education. Instructional content, previously restricted to the classroom, is now being broadcast at lightning speeds to anywhere from bustling metropolises to rural suburbs. Information that was inaccessible is suddenly present, organised and ready for consumption by anyone who is yearning to learn.

In our neck of the woods, where public universities are rife with enormous student teacher ratios and private education comes at the expense of debt-inducing tuition, the online learning phenomenon can prove to be a game changer.

Fahad Malik

In fact, Pakistan was among the pioneering nations to develop and successfully implement distant learning in the form of Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU). Courses were offered and degrees conferred in several disciplines in humanities and sciences to those who couldn’t access higher education due to distance, financial woes or simply luck.

Along the way, however, we lost our grand vision of ‘education for all’ — mostly due to our own inability to recognise the magnitude of the breakthrough we had made. AIOU took a backseat and a half-hearted Virtual University emerged.

Online learning could help us regain that lost footing as well as bridge the gap between public and private education.

Offered free or at a fraction of the cost online learning is a multifaceted and impactful medium of instruction that takes educational content developed at universities or by specialist educators and houses it on the internet for popular consumption by the masses.

Unlike conventional learning settings with time constraints, limited student-teacher interaction etc, virtual learning provides education tailored to meet the specific needs of each student. Passive exercises of listening to lectures and jotting notes are replaced with audio or video instruction, which enables students to stop, pause or rewind often until mastery over a topic of interest has been achieved.

While some students might pursue advanced topics that further their understanding of a discipline, others might chose to take foundational courses. The freedom to choose, therefore, rejects the ‘one size fits all’ model of education and presents a more coherent, customizable form of curriculum. This manner of end-to-end control over learning was previously absent in one-dimensional classroom environments.

Analysing the core ingredients of these unique courses reveals that, once constraints of conventional classrooms are removed, several lucrative opportunities emerge. The hour-long monolithic lecture, for instance, can be broken down into modular eight- to 12-minute units, each representing a coherent concept.

Accounting for an average human attention span of 15-minutes, these digestible chunks allow students to traverse the materials in several different ways depending on their background, skills or interests; thus allowing for better absorption of knowledge.

Interestingly, one unexpected benefit of online learning manifests in the form of data. Intelligence gathered from online interactions gives unprecedented insights into a student’s learning patterns/interactive behaviour.

Imagine the possibilities: human learning can be transitioned from hypothesis-based mode to data-driven mode to understand fundamental questions like what learning strategies are effective versus ones that are not. Similarly, in the context of specific courses, common misconceptions can be identified and solutions developed.

Advocates of conventional learning often highlight the multisensory appeal of the traditional method. The ability to participate in group projects, experience on-campus, and most of all, develop lifelong friendships are all plausible arguments in context of attending a formal institution of study.

The glaring reality, however, stands in stark contrast to those parallels. According to Unesco, 25 million children in Pakistan — 63pc are girls — are not enrolled at any institution of study. This ranks our country second behind Nigeria in the line of nations where the youth are not afforded the opportunity to academically train and develop suitable skillsets.

The majority of that number represents youth who face social, cultural or financial barriers, restricting their access to mainstream academics. Providing cheap smart devices that connect to internally developed opencoursewares could be one such solution that solves the accessibility problem to a large extent.

Virtual access not only leads to unparalleled proliferation of knowledge, but also creates a curriculum singularity that offers the same educational quality to every student regardless of age, location or financial situation. Political rhetoric about implementing the same curriculum throughout the nation could become a tangible reality if the online learning framework is properly road-mapped and strategically implemented.

The writer is the founding CEO of a digital services startup.

Twitter: @fahadamalik

This story was originally published by Dawn, Pakistan