By Hina Durrani
ISLAMABAD, Jul 12: Climate expert Ali Tauqeer Sheikh stressed that while Pakistan’s legal case under the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) was strong, but climate change posed a far greater and rapidly escalating threat to the Indus Basin.
In an interview with APP, Sheikh noted that Pakistan’s response to recent Indian arguments was firmly grounded in international law, particularly in light of the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s rulings and the treaty’s provisions safeguarding downstream rights. “On the legal points, Pakistan’s rebuttal is strong,” he said.
Referring to the ongoing debate over the treaty, Sheikh cautioned that the Himalayan watershed has already lost nearly a quarter of its perennial ice cover due to climate change.
“Climate change is the third commissioner. It attends no meetings and honours no awards, but it is already rewriting the treaty,” he said.
He said that the treaty contained no provisions for altered river flows, intensified glacial melt, or increasingly erratic monsoon behaviour, factors that were already reshaping hydrology across the basin.
To respond effectively, Sheikh urged both countries to revive the Permanent Indus Commission with real-time data sharing, update infrastructure design standards to reflect current climatic conditions, and jointly address delta degradation, groundwater depletion, and sediment loss.
“The Indus Basin is a shared ecological system on which the food security of roughly 300 million people depends,” he said. “No treaty revision, arbitral award, or abeyance declaration can address that unilaterally. The only question is whether the two parties act before climate change finishes rewriting the treaty for them,” Sheikh concluded.
