Water wastage

Preventable crises are often the ones that hit the hardest, and Pakistan’s looming water emergency is no exception. A new World Bank report on water conservation has delivered what should be a wake-up call for policymakers. It states that Pakistan is among the worst offenders in inefficient agricultural water use at a time when the country is rapidly drying. In fact, the country stands alongside only five other nations where poor water management and increasingly arid conditions now collide with dangerous force.

The world is losing 324 billion cubic metres of freshwater every year – enough to meet the annual needs of 280 million people. Much of this loss is driven not by natural scarcity alone but by unsustainable practices and the steady expansion of agriculture into crops that simply require more water than our climate can reliably offer. In other words, we are bleeding water at a time when we should be conserving every drop. This should alarm a country where agriculture consumes more than 90% of freshwater resources and where climate-induced droughts are intensifying year after year.

Over the last two decades, Pakistan has shifted toward cultivating more water-intensive crops. Rice and sugarcane continue to dominate despite repeated warnings that they are ill-suited to arid and semi-arid conditions. This inefficiency is compounded by outdated irrigation systems that lose massive volumes of water before it even reaches the fields. Add deforestation, wetland degradation and poor groundwater governance to the mix, and the country’s water security becomes nothing short of precarious.

The government cannot continue business as usual. Mere rhetoric about “water scarcity” is no longer enough when backed by such alarming global evidence. Pakistan urgently needs a three-pronged approach: a decisive shift away from water-intensive crops; modernisation of irrigation infrastructure; and the introduction of realistic water pricing that discourages waste.