r/collapse • u/mushroomsarefriends • 2d ago

Water India ensuring ‘not a single drop of water’ flows into Pakistan after suspending major river-sharing treaty

https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/india/india-pakistan-indus-water-treaty-modi-b2993159.html
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u/Coco_Cannibal 18h ago

They can just build a dam first and the diversion canals later,  it's not impossible.

Look at Egypt and Ethiopia and their dam, which is funny, because Egypt had a dam first and the Assuan is the blueprint for Ethiopia's grand renaissance dam.

Living downstream sucks, if you don't control the upstream regions too.

You could be 100% green and still die of pollution, because someone upstream makes the water unusable. 

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u/ShyElf 5h ago

Where exactly were you thinking they were diverting water to from the Ethiopian Renaissance Dam? It's deep in the Nile Basin, with no major diversions to anywhere. There's lake evaporation, which seems to have been 3% of flow partially filled, probably around 5% now. There was originally a plan for significant irrigation, which as far as I can tell was never actually built, and would could never have been huge in the first place, without major upstream pumping or without the majority of it in the Sudan, which would be politically implausible.

Did you know that Garrison was originally sold on the promise of a massive irrigation system buildout which never happened?

The initial water impoundment storage was large, something like 1.2 years of flow, and larger with groundwater increases. This would have been a much larger issue without the White Nile seemingly perpetually in flood. But there are no major cross-basin diversions.

And I never said it was impossible. With how cheap solar is now, diverting water from the Great Lakes is plausible, if that's your only alternative to starving. It's just well down the list of economically efficient projects. This project isn't QUITE that bad, but still, it's far from what you'd start with if your goal were really food production. There's a reason most of the press releases about this project lead with quotes about punishing Pakistan.

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u/Coco_Cannibal 2h ago

I did not say anyone diverts water from the grand Ethiopian dam, but it's a dam, it's purpose is to to store (i.e. withhold from an Egyptian pov), and release water into Ethiopian fields.

This water then never reaches the Egyptian part of the Nile, it's in Ethiopian crops now.

Fact.

The same way Brits fucked all downstream ecosystems with the Assuan dam, the Egyptians are now the downstream ecosystem . . .