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ASIA: Water is a good servant but a bad master: The floods in northwest Pakistan could be a taste of things to come. A recent report warns that in the next two decades factors like climate change could worsen water-related humanitarian crises.

The waters of the Third Pole, produced by the Humanitarian Futures Programme at King's College, London, said the region was not prepared to deal with such crises.

The flooded part of Pakistan lies in the Hindu Kush-Himalayan (HKH) region, billed as the most disaster-prone in the world, according to the Nepal-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), which serves as a regional policy think-tank for its eight member countries.

The HKH region is sometimes referred to as the Third Pole because it has the largest expanse of frozen water outside the Polar Regions.

"The supply and quality of water in this region are under extreme threat, both from the effects of human activity, and from natural processes and [climate] variation," said the report. The 10 rivers originating in the region provide water to 20 percent of the world's population, and flow across countries "fraught with cross-border tensions", often prompted by water sharing and dam construction.

Conflict, mass migration and food insecurity could make water-related crises even more daunting and politically sensitive; defusing these crises would require a more proactive role by regional humanitarian aid players said Randolph Kent, director the Humanitarian Futures programme.

Traditional humanitarian organisations would "have to be less intrusive, and more able to support local and regional prevention, preparedness and response capacities," he suggested.

Climate change, one of the main natural drivers, is expected to exacerbate "flooding and its virulence in the region in the months and years to come", ICIMOD noted on its website.

But "perhaps nowhere else on earth" will the impact of climate change be "more significant" than in the HKH region, "with huge volumes of water moving from mountains to sea [caused by glacial melt in the Hindu Kush and Himalayan ranges]," the report said.

The 10 large Asian river systems – the Amu Darya, Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra (or Yarlungtsanpo), Irrawaddy, Salween (or Nu), Mekong or Lancang, Yangtse (or Jinsha), Yellow River (or Huanghe), and Tarim (or Dayan) - provide water to more than a billion people and support more than 210 million directly.

Besides meeting the demands of a rapidly expanding population in an area with considerable human conflict, the region is a highly active geologic zone, making it "one of the world's most dynamic, complex and intensive risk hotspots", Kent commented.

The HKH region covers the whole of Bhutan and Nepal, about half the territories of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Myanmar, China has a foothold of about 17 percent, India has 14 percent and Bangladesh eight percent, according to ICIMOD.

How prepared are so many countries, with most of the world's population sharing the same resources, to act in concert? "How, in other words, would regional actors, working in cooperation, deal with the impact of a major flood affecting the India-Pakistan borders, at the same time a cyclone hits the coastline of Bangladesh?"

The region would have to come up with a new way of planning its response to crises while reducing its vulnerability. "Vulnerability will need to be the main focus," said Kent. Countries would have to map vulnerable populations and areas regionally, and construct future scenarios to help prepare for disasters.

Source: JOHANNESBURG, (IRIN)

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