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Tensions over Kashmir and a warming planet have placed the Indus Waters Treaty on life support
In 1995, World Bank Vice President Ismail Serageldin warned that whereas the conflicts of the previous 100 years had been over oil, “the wars of the next century will be fought over water.”
Thirty years on, that prediction is being tested in one of the world’s most volatile regions: Kashmir.
On April 24, 2025, the government of India announced that it would downgrade diplomatic ties with its neighbor Pakistan over an attack by militants in Kashmir that killed 26 tourists. As part of that cooling of relations, India said it would immediately suspend the Indus Waters Treaty – a decades-old agreement that allowed both countries to share water use from the rivers that flow from India into Pakistan. Pakistan has promised reciprocal moves and warned that any disruption to its water supply would be considered “an act of war.”
The current flareup escalated quickly, but has a long history. At the Indus Basin Water Project at the Ohio State University, we are engaged in a multiyear project investigating the transboundary water dispute between Pakistan and India.
I am currently in Pakistan conducting fieldwork in Kashmir and across the Indus Basin. Geopolitical tensions in the region, which have been worsened by the recent attack in Pahalgam, Indian-administered Kashmir, do pose a major threat to the water treaty. So too does another factor that is helping escalate the tensions: climate change
The Indus River has supported life for thousands of years since the Harappan civilization, which flourished around 2600 to 1900 B.C.E. in what is now Pakistan and northwest India.
After the partition of India in 1947, control of the Indus River system became a major source of tension between the two nations that emerged from partition: India and Pakistan. Disputes arose almost immediately, particularly when India temporarily halted water flow to Pakistan in 1948, prompting fears over agricultural collapse. These early confrontations led to years of negotiations, culminating in the signing of the Indus Waters Treaty in 1960.
Brokered © The Conversation
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