Running Dry: Pakistan's Growing Water Scarcity Crisis

Pakistan crossed the internationally recognized "water-scarce" threshold of 1,000 cubic meters of renewable water per person per year back in 2010, according to the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources, and the trajectory since has continued in the same direction: per-capita availability stood at about 935 cubic meters a year in the government's 2019-20 National Annual Plan, down from 5,260 cubic meters seven decades earlier. The Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) had warned as early as 2016 that the country could fall below the more severe "absolute scarcity" line of 500 cubic meters by 2025 — a threshold that, as of the most recent figures available, Pakistan has not yet crossed, though the underlying trend that prompted the warning hasn't reversed either. For a country where agriculture — heavily dependent on irrigation from the Indus basin — remains a cornerstone of the economy and employment, that trend carries serious long-term consequences.

Why availability keeps declining

Several forces are compounding at once:

• Population growth. Pakistan's population has grown substantially in recent decades, meaning the same or a shrinking volume of water is now divided among far more people than in previous generations.
• Glacial and snowmelt volatility. The Indus basin depends heavily on glacial and snowmelt from the Himalayas, Karakoram and Hindu Kush ranges. Climate change is altering the timing and volume of that melt, making seasonal water availability less predictable even where long-term totals haven't shifted dramatically.
• Inefficient irrigation. A large share of agricultural water use relies on flood irrigation methods that lose significant volumes to evaporation and seepage, rather than more water-efficient drip or sprinkler systems.
• Groundwater depletion. In areas where surface water access is unreliable, farmers and municipalities have increasingly turned to groundwater extraction, in many cases faster than aquifers can naturally recharge.
• Limited storage capacity. Pakistan's dam and reservoir storage capacity, relative to the volume of the Indus system's annual flow, lags well behind many other countries with comparable river systems — leaving less of a buffer to manage seasonal variability.

The agricultural stakes

Agriculture accounts for the large majority of Pakistan's water consumption and remains central to rural employment and food security. Water scarcity doesn't just threaten crop yields directly — it also intensifies competition between agricultural, urban and industrial water users, a tension that plays out at both the provincial level (inter-provincial water-sharing disputes) and the local level (competition between upstream and downstream farmers).

Urban water stress

The crisis isn't confined to rural agriculture. Major cities, including Karachi, face chronic water supply shortfalls driven by a combination of aging distribution infrastructure, rapid urban population growth, and — in Karachi's case specifically — heavy reliance on a water supply system that hasn't kept pace with the city's expansion.

Paths toward a more sustainable water future

Water resource experts generally point to a combination of supply-side and demand-side measures:

1. Modernizing irrigation infrastructure, shifting a larger share of agricultural water use toward drip and sprinkler systems, particularly for water-intensive crops.
2. Expanding storage capacity, through a combination of new reservoirs and smaller-scale, community-level water storage that can buffer seasonal variability without the political and environmental complexity of large dam projects.
3. Regulating groundwater extraction, an area where enforcement has historically been weak, to prevent unsustainable aquifer depletion.
4. Investing in urban water infrastructure, particularly in fast-growing cities where distribution losses and inadequate supply networks compound scarcity.
5. Strengthening inter-provincial water governance, ensuring water-sharing agreements reflect current hydrological realities and are seen as equitable by all provinces.

Water scarcity is often described as a slower-moving crisis than floods or earthquakes — but its cumulative economic and social costs, left unaddressed, could ultimately prove just as significant.

Build Better Pakistan's Climate Desk covers water security alongside our broader climate resilience reporting.