22/06/2020

(AU) The Coal Curse: Fuelling Division On Land Rights And Climate Change

Sydney Morning Herald - Judith Brett

Australians were generally happy to ride on the sheep’s back. Many of us are not at all happy to be riding in a coal cart. Australia has robust legal institutions and our politics is relatively democratic and accountable, but since the turn of the century fossil-­fuel miners have massively increased their influence over both sides of politics, and over state and federal governments.

Former PM Malcolm Turnbull returned to Canberra to listen to the Indonesian President address Parliament, but offered up his thoughts on building more coal fired power stations that's being pushed by some Nationals.

This article is an edited extract of
Judith Brett’s Quarterly Essay
The Coal Curse: Resources, Climate and Australia’s Future
The main game has been to head-off government action to reduce carbon emissions. This has weakened Australia’s willingness to play its part in reducing global warming, but the effects of the curse have spread beyond this, contributing to debilitating political polarisation.

The first Australians to suffer from the politics of the resource curse were Indigenous Australians. During the 1980s and 1990s, as the mining lobby effectively weakened legislation on land rights and native title, it developed the strategies it would later use to stymie effective government action on climate change.

When the Australian Mining Industries Council (AMIC) was formed in 1967, its initial aims were conventional industry matters, such as the rules governing foreign investment or the exchange rate. But mining was starting to face a quite different set of challenges.

The new mining boom was concentrated in Australia’s north, where many Indigenous Australians had continued to live on or close to their country. Some groups were demanding land rights, including the capacity to veto mining. Conservationists were pushing the government on mining’s environmental impact, and there was suspicion of the extent of foreign ownership.

Because mining employed few people, it could rely less on electoral pressure than other economic interest groups. The miners needed to convince the public that mining was crucial to national development and prosperity and so should not be curtailed.

In 1972, AMIC imposed a special levy on its members to fund campaigns focused on mass audiences rather than governments. Contacts in the media were fostered: articles and advertisements placed in newspapers, TV and radio; material prepared for public affairs programs.

In 1973, the new Labor government’s minister for minerals and energy, Rex Connor, commissioned a report on the contribution of mining to Australia’s welfare. The report by economist Tom Fitzgerald questioned the assumption that mining was inherently beneficial to the Australian economy and confirmed the industry’s conviction that it could not take the public’s support for granted.

Prime Minister John Howard (left) is shown around the expanded Olympic Dam mine in South Australia by Western Mining's Hugh Morgan in 1999. Morgan had begun his campaigns to influence politicians in the 1970s. Credit: Bryan Charlton

Western Mining’s Hugh Morgan, who in 1976 would become the company’s executive director, identified the report as a turning point both for himself and the industry. He realised, he later told Gerard Henderson, that to survive the mining industry had to persuade the community of its benefits and take on its adversaries. Ray Evans, a conservative engineer, was hired as a speechwriter to assist with these tasks.

By the early 1980s, Morgan and Evans were leading figures in what was then called the Australian New Right, a loose network of conservative men – and a few women – in high places, who combined a zeal for free-­market economics with opposition to the progressive causes of the 1970s, including land rights and environmentalism.

Through think tanks such as the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies, through newsletters and conferences, private dinners and informal gatherings, they developed arguments and strategies to counter what they saw as a dangerous left-­wing grip on public opinion.

“Politicians can only accept what is accepted in the public opinion polls, so you have to change public opinion,” Morgan told Paul Sheehan of The Sydney Morning Herald in 1985. By then he had become a vehement opponent of Indigenous land rights.

Gough Whitlam had taken a commitment to land rights to the 1972 election. In government, he appointed Justice Edward Woodward to conduct a royal commission into Aboriginal land rights in the Northern Territory. Woodward’s recommendations were revolutionary. Here are some:
  • all Aboriginal reserve lands were to be returned to their Aboriginal inhabitants;
  • Aboriginal people could claim vacant Crown land on the basis of traditional ties with the land;
  • and - most importantly for the subject of this essay - entry into Aboriginal land for mining and tourism required the consent of the local community.
Aboriginal people were to be given the possibility of vetoing mining developments, and mining companies would have to pay royalties to the traditional owners, though the Commonwealth retained the power to overrule any Aboriginal veto in the national interest.

After the Whitlam government was dismissed at the end of 1975, the incoming Liberal prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, generally supported Woodward’s recommendations, and his government passed the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act in 1976. AMIC wanted the veto abolished and royalties reduced, as did the Northern Territory government, which saw the Act as a brake on development.

Then prime minister Malcolm Fraser (top) sits in the bed of the Todd River in the Northern Territory speaking to Indigenous locals in April 1978. Credit: Age archive

By the early 1980s, a patchwork of laws and practices governed land rights across the continent. Labor took a commitment to uniform land-­rights legislation to the 1983 election, promising to use Commonwealth powers to override unco-operative states.

The draft proposed minimum uniform land rights across the states and territories, including protection of sacred sites, a veto over mining, and royalties. A fear campaign began, led by AMIC and the Western Australian Chamber of Mines, with media releases, opinion pieces and press, radio and TV advertising, including full-­page advertisements in national newspapers.

The public campaign was designed to make ordinary Australians with no direct involvement in mining feel they had a stake in disputes happening far from where they lived. The centrepiece was the argument that Aborigines should not have special rights. AMIC distributed speakers’ notes with arguments such as: “Land rights should be equal rights, not greater rights”; “Australia is one country and there should be one set of laws for everyone”; “No country can be divided against itself and survive.”

It claimed that the proposed legislation had the power to lock-up a quarter of Australia’s surface, bring mining exploration to a halt and damage the nation’s prosperity. In Western Australia, a TV ad showed a black hand reaching across the state to build a wall: the message was that land rights would lock-up vast areas of territory.

The appeal to equality rejected arguments that Aboriginal people’s distinctive relationship to the land, and their distinctive suffering as a colonised people, entitled them to special rights or treatment. It was a powerful appeal and support for land rights started to fall, among both the public and elected politicians.

The WA premier, Brian Burke, told Hawke that the commitment to uniform land rights could cost Labor up to eight seats in his state at the 1984 federal election. Hawke dropped the veto over mining exploration, and by 1986 the government had effectively abandoned the promise of uniform legislation, leaving the states to do as they wished.

Demonstrators in Sydney march on John Howard's office in December 1997. Credit: Paul Jones

Then came the High Court’s 1992 Mabo judgment, when the miners needed to defend themselves all over again. Land rights were legislated rights, created by the state and federal parliaments, and they did not challenge European Australia’s foundational assumption that when Captain Cook claimed Australia for the Crown there were no pre-­existing property rights, that it was terra nullius.

The High Court’s finding that in certain circumstances a form of native title might still exist unleashed an even nastier and more divisive campaign than the one waged against uniform land rights.

Hugh Morgan called on the Coalition to overrule the Mabo decision if they won government by passing legislation to extinguish native title. As this would open the government to unknown claims for compensation for the extinguished rights, conservatives also called for the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act to be overturned so that native title rights could be abolished without compensation. Victorian premier Jeff Kennett played on fears by falsely suggesting that even suburban backyards could be at risk.

John Howard speaks to the media after a special meeting with premiers in April 1997 called to discuss a response to the High Court's Wik decision. Credit: Mike Bowers

Paul Keating, who was now prime minister, saw the Mabo judgment as a historic judgment that laid the foundation for reconciliation. Others saw it very differently. State governments did not want to concede their rights over land titles; mining and pastoral interests were alarmed about the potential impact on their leases; and many, but not all, of the Coalition opposed Aborigines being treated any differently from other Australians.

After extensive consultations, including with Indigenous groups, the Native Title Act passed at the end of 1993. Native title holders could negotiate over development, but they did not hold any veto powers.

The Mabo judgment was clear that freehold title extinguished native title, but it said nothing about leases. At the end of 1996 another High Court judgment in a case bought by the Wik people of Aurukun found that leases did not necessarily extinguish native title.

In response the new prime minister, John Howard, held up to a television camera a map of Australia showing just how much of the continent might be subject to claims. The National Party’s leader, Tim Fischer, toured the bush calling for “bucket-­loads of extinguishment”, as if native title was a fire threat.

Howard rejected extinguishment because of the unknown compensation it would trigger, but the 10-­point plan he developed severely curtailed the rights of native title holders and did not include the right to negotiate with mining companies on pastoral leases.

The campaigns against uniform land rights and then native title built an alliance between the National Party and Australia’s miners. Miners could spruik their contribution to Australia’s national prosperity, but they were hard-­pressed to give this a human face. The National Party could provide any number: weathered old farmers talking about their pioneering forebears and their deep love of the land; or young couples living in the outback and raising their kids far from city amenities.

These tough men and women wearing Akubras and standing in outback landscapes were invaluable to the miners’ campaign to associate the fight against native title with a shared national heritage, to make it seem relevant to the vast maj­ority of Australians, who would never be affected by a native title claim.

The campaign was also invaluable to the National Party. Beginning life in 1920 as the Australian Country Party to represent farmers and rural communities, its base was shrinking. When Fraser defeated Whitlam at the end of 1975, the National Country Party won 11.04 per cent of the national first preference vote and 22 seats. In 1996, when Howard defeated Keating, it was 8.2 per cent and 18 seats.

The problems facing the National Party were not just a shrinking base but uncertainty about what it stood for. Its Coalition partner was enthusiastically embracing free-­market policies, which threatened the many subsidised services country people enjoyed. Yet it could not openly break

with the Liberals and risk its cabinet positions. Fighting against Aboriginal land rights gave it new relevance, and the miners paid for advertisements which reminded the public that the Australians at the heart of the country were the men and women on the land.

After John Howard won the 1996 federal election, policies seen to favour Indigenous Australians were an immediate target, frequently justified with one-­line arguments about equality straight from AMIC’s 1980s speakers’ notes against land rights. The miners were defending their economic interests but in doing this they had weakened public sympathy for Aboriginal people and popularised arguments against their distinctive rights. Here was the resource curse in action. Pauline Hanson rode into parliament on such arguments, and they are trotted out regularly by conservatives.

The big miners did subsequently work hard to repair their credentials with Indigenous Australians, developing strategies to boost employment, offering scholarships and cadetships, employing archaeologists and anthropologists to advise on cultural heritage. BHP, Rio Tinto, Glencore and Fortescue all proclaim a commitment to engaging with Indigenous people and outline various targeted programs on their websites. They could be generous once they had won.

The mining industry’s campaign against land rights and native title gave it the capacity to mount public relations and advertising campaigns and the confidence that it could win; and it created a network of influential right-­wing warriors primed to defend Australia’s existing distribution of power and resources. When climate change began seriously to threaten fossil-­fuel miners at the end of last century, they knew what to do.

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Study: Climate Change Crisis Requires Less Growth-Oriented Global Economy

UPI - Brooks Hays

The pursuit of affluence is a major impediment to curbing global warming and repairing Earth's damaged ecosystems, researchers argue in a new paper. Photo by nikolabelopitov/Pixabay

Economies and consumers can't aspire to both affluence and sustainability, researchers warn in a new paper, published Friday in the journal Nature Communications.

Hundreds of studies have highlighted the challenges facing the planet's climate, biodiversity and food systems -- global warming, pollution, habitat loss -- but few have focused on the relationship between Earth's climate and ecological crises and the planet's growth-oriented economies and the pursuit of affluence.

Many economists, business leaders, policy makers and even a few climate scientists have suggested technological advances will see planet Earth and its economies through the climate crisis -- continuing economic growth but with a smaller carbon footprint.

Sustainable lifestyles are situated between an upper limit of permissible use “Environmental ceiling” and a lower limit of necessary use of environmental resources “Social foundation”.

But a new paper by an international team of scientists argues such predictions ignore the realities of economic and environmental history.

The authors claim the pursuit of affluence is a major impediment to curbing global warming and repairing Earth's damaged ecosystems.

"Our paper has shown that it's actually dangerous and leads to planetary-scale destruction," Julia Steinberger, a professor of ecological economics at the University of Leeds in Britain, said in a news release. "To protect ourselves from the worsening climate crisis, we must reduce inequality and challenge the notion that riches, and those who possess them, are inherently good."

For the study, researchers looked at the drivers of consumption across the world's largest economies, as well as the role of technology in the pursuit of sustainability.

"In our scientists' warning, we identify the underlying forces of overconsumption and spell out the measures that are needed to tackle the overwhelming 'power' of consumption and the economic growth paradigm -- that's the gap we fill," said lead study author Tommy Wiedmann, professor of environmental engineering at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

Analysis of economic and energy-use trends over the last four decades showed that wealth growth has continuously outpaced efficiency gains.

"Technology can help us to consume more efficiently -- to save energy and resources -- but these technological improvements cannot keep pace with our ever-increasing levels of consumption," Wiedmann said.

Shown is how the global material footprint (MF, equal to global raw material extraction) and global CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel combustion and industrial processes (CO2 FFI) changed compared with global GDP (constant 2010 USD). Indexed to 1 in 1990. Data sources: https://www.resourcepanel.org/global-material-flows-database, http://www.globalcarbonatlas.org and https://data.worldbank.org.





The new research also highlighted what many critiques of climate change mitigation plans have pointed out -- that the world's wealthiest citizens shoulder most of the blame for the planet's environmental problems.

The wealthiest citizens have the largest carbon footprint and apply the greatest negative pressure to natural resources, researchers said.

"Consumption of affluent households worldwide is by far the strongest determinant - and the strongest accelerator -- of increased global environmental and social impacts," said study co-author Lorenz Keysser, researcher at ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

But authors of the new study suggest it is not just individual attitudes about affluence that must change. They also note that all of the world's largest economies are designed to prioritize growth, which they call problematic.

"The structural imperative for growth in competitive market economies leads to decision makers being locked into bolstering economic growth, and inhibiting necessary societal changes," Wiedmann said. "So, we have to get away from our obsession with economic growth -- we really need to start managing our economies in a way that protects our climate and natural resources, even if this means less, no or even negative growth."

To address the problem of overconsumption by the planet's wealthiest citizens, researchers suggest a range of taxes could be used to alter spending behaviors and shift investment patterns.

Some scientists estimate that the world's economies will actually need to shrink in order to stave off ecological disaster.

"'Degrowth' proponents go a step further and suggest a more radical social change that leads away from capitalism to other forms of economic and social governance," Wiedmann said.

"Policies may include, for example, eco-taxes, green investments, wealth redistribution through taxation and a maximum income, a guaranteed basic income and reduced working hours," Wiedmann said.

While there is disagreement on what must be done, authors of the new paper claim there is no doubt that current economic trends are unsustainable.

"The strongest pillar of the necessary transformation is to avoid or to reduce consumption until the remaining consumption level falls within planetary boundaries, while fulfilling human needs," researchers wrote in the new paper.

"Avoiding consumption means not consuming certain goods and services, from living space (overly large homes, secondary residences of the wealthy) to oversized vehicles, environmentally damaging and wasteful food, leisure patterns and work patterns involving driving and flying."

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(AU) We've Been Talking Climate Change Action For 30 Years. Will Covid-19 Finally Jolt Us Into Gear?

ABC News - Michael Slezak

For 30 years we've completely failed to lower global emissions — we don't have the luxury of failing for the next 30. (ABC News: Jesse Thompson)

Author
Michael Slezak is the ABC's national science, technology and environment reporter.
 The day after I turned eight, MC Hammer released the hit single, U Can't Touch This.

While 1990 was arguably the peak of MC Hammer's career, it was also arguably the year international action on climate change began.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) handed down its first assessment report, which said scientists were "certain" greenhouse gases emitted by humans would warm the world.

Thirty years later, MC Hammer might feel like ancient history, but he puts into perspective how long we've been talking about climate action.

Earlier this year, I realised something shocking: If 1990 was the year we started acting on climate change, we are now halfway along our timeline for transitioning the world to a zero-carbon economy.

In the latest IPCC report, it is estimated that we need to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 to have a reasonable chance of keeping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius. That is as far in the future as 1990 is in the past.

In other words, we've spent as long dithering on climate as we have time to completely eliminate our contribution to climate-warming pollution: 30 years.

So with three decades gone, and 30 years to go, what have we achieved so far?

We've gone backwards

On the one hand, we have now mostly developed the technology required to achieve the transition. We've also put international frameworks in place that could guide it.

But where it matters — stopping the burning of fossil fuels, for instance — we've done nothing.

Actually, we've arguably done worse than nothing. We've emitted more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels since that 1990 report and hit single than we have during the rest of human history before 1990.

At this crucial point, the world has been shaken by the COVID-19 pandemic, and its economic fallout. But the inevitable response to that economic crisis is an opportunity, too.

Australia has recently experienced unprecedented bushfires, with the world now seeing what about one degree of warming can mean. (Australian Story: Ben Cheshire)

This week the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the International Monetary Fund made this point in no uncertain terms.

It projected a massive drop in energy-related emissions from the COVID-19 fallout. It also said decisions made in the coming months will determine whether economic stimulus will see emissions rebound, or make 2019 the peak in global emissions.

"Governments have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reboot their economies and bring a wave of new employment opportunities while accelerating the shift to a more resilient and cleaner energy future," said Dr Fatih Birol, the IEA's executive director.

What did we know back then?

In that first IPCC report in 1990, it was estimated that if the burning of fossil fuels continued to accelerate steadily, the world would warm by about one degree by 2025.

They were right, except emissions increased faster than modelled and the world had warmed by one degree about a decade earlier.

That report, with its clear summary for policymakers, can be seen as the start of a sequence of events that led to all our international climate change agreements.

The year 1990 — or perhaps 1992, when the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted — is the year after which there was no excuse for world leaders not understanding the significance of climate change.

Coral bleaching at Magnetic Island, North Queensland, in March 2020. (Supplied: Victor Huertas)

All those international agreements allow nations to determine their own level of action. That means agreements only achieve things if countries decide to take strong action.

Australia is among a handful of influential countries that have been widely criticised for failing to do that.

The years 2050 and 1990 are now equally far from today, but the world's response to climate change must be radically different in those two periods if we want to keep warming at 1.5 degrees — which is what most countries pledged to try to do as part of the Paris Agreement.

If we continue along our current path, the scientists who issued warnings — the IPCC — are clear about what will happen: By 2050, the world will be pushing two degrees of warming.

What does that mean on the ground?

Well, the world is now seeing what about one degree of warming means. Australia has recently experienced unprecedented bushfires and lost half the coral on the Great Barrier Reef.

Heat records are being broken at unprecedented rates, and cold records are vanishing into the past.

The transition to a zero-carbon world will bring both pain and opportunity.

Jobs will be lost in some industries, but transitioning those jobs to new industries must be a priority. And side-effects of stopping climate change can be cleaner air, more reliable electricity grids and safer work.

According to a coalition of organisations including the Business Council of Australia, the Australian Industry group and now the International Energy Agency, a recovery from the COVID-19 economic crisis can be achieved while bringing down emissions.

Building a safe world, they say, will not come at the expense of jobs and economic growth, but will instead build jobs and growth.

We have the technology and framework to change, and a business community largely prepared to do the work. But for 30 years we've completely failed to lower global emissions.

We don't have the luxury of failing for the next 30.

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21/06/2020

Who Is Really To Blame For Climate Change?

BBC Future - Jocelyn Timperley

We know that climate change is caused by human activity, but pinning down exactly who is responsible is trickier than it might seem.

(Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/Getty)

One of the most frustrating things about the climate crisis is that the fact that earlier action could have prevented it. With every passing year of inaction, the emissions cuts needed to limit global warming to relatively safe levels grow steeper and steeper.

Many groups have been accused of being at blame for this ongoing lack of action, from fossil fuel companies and wealthy countries, to politicians, rich people and sometimes even all of us.

Others may feel it’s not useful to blame anyone. “If you want to engage with the non-converted and get them to want stronger climate action, blaming them is not going to be a very fruitful pathway,” says Glen Peters, research director of the Center for International Climate and Environment Research in Oslo.

Whether we label it blame or not, the question of who is responsible for the climate crisis is a necessary one. It will inevitably impact the solutions we propose to fix things.

But it’s also important to acknowledge that allocating emissions to someone – the extractors of fossil fuels, the manufacturers who make products using them, the governments who regulate these products, the consumers who buy them – does not necessarily mean saying they are responsible for them.

For example, many people across the world lack access to a steady, clean electricity supply and instead use high-emission diesel generators to generate electricity. You can allocate these emissions to the people using the generators, but it is hard to say they are to blame for them.

“You’re just slicing through the system at one end of the supply chain versus the other,” says Julia Steinberger, professor of ecological economics at the University of Leeds. “That alone is not enough to allocate blame.”
Seventy percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions over the previous two decades are attributable to just 100 fossil fuel producers
What examining each of these links of the supply chain does do, however, is allow us to understand this complex system differently, she adds.

But ultimately what is important is understanding who holds the power over the choices available to everyone else. By challenging how, and for whom, that power is gained and used, perhaps we can begin to shed light on how to truly turn things around on climate.

Fossil fuel companies

Fossil fuel firms clearly play a major role in the climate problem. A major report released in 2017 attributed 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions over the previous two decades to just 100 fossil fuel producers. An update last year outlined the top 20 fossil fuel firms behind a third of emissions.

But it is not only through their ongoing extraction of fossil fuels that these companies have had such a huge impact on climate action. They have also worked hard to shape the public narrative. In 2015, an investigation by US website Inside Climate News revealed that the oil firm Exxon knew about climate change for decades and led efforts to block measures to cut emissions.

Revelations like this have contributed to strong public anger at fossil fuels firms. Many now think that such companies have said and done everything they could to be able to continue extracting and burning fossil fuels – no matter the cost.

A tiny proportion of firms are responsible for the lion's share of carbon emissions (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/Getty)

Amy Westervelt is a climate journalist who has spent years exploring the thinking behind big oil’s strategy over the past decades, most recently in her podcast Drilled. She says there was a point in the late 1970s when oil companies in the US like Exxon appeared to be embracing renewables and increasingly viewing themselves energy companies, rather than just oil companies.

But this mindset had changed completely by the early 1990s due to a series of oil crises and changing leadership, she says. “There was this real sort of shift in mindset from ‘If we have a seat at the table, we can help to shape the regulations,’ to ‘We need to stop any kind of regulation happening.’”

Fossil fuel firms have since done “a great job” of making any kind of environmental concerns seem elitist, adds Westervelt. For example, Rex Tillerson, the Exxon chief executive who went on to be US secretary of state, repeatedly argued that cutting oil use to fight climate change would make poverty reduction harder. “They have this talking point that they've been trotting out since the 1950s, that if you want to make that industry cleaner in any way, then you’re basically unfairly impacting the poor. Never mind that the costs don’t actually have to be offloaded on to the public.”

At the same time, fossil fuel companies have long employed PR tactics in a bid to control the narrative around climate change, says Westervelt, pushing doubts about the science and working to influence how people understand the role of fossil fuels in the economy. “They have put a real emphasis on creating materials for social studies, economics and civics classes that all centre the fossil fuel industry,” says Westervelt. “I think there’s a real lack of understanding about just how much that industry has shaped how people think about everything, and very deliberately so.”

A small group of scientists with links to right-wing think tanks and industry have for decades distorted public debate by sowing doubt on well-established scientific knowledge in the US, including on climate, according to Merchants of Doubt, the 2010 exposé by historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway.

“Ever since scientists first began to explain the evidence that our climate was warming – and that human activities were probably to blame – people have been questioning the data, doubting the evidence and attacking the scientists who collect and explain it,” they write.

Scientific evidence that emissions from human activity would cause climate change has a surprisingly long history (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/Getty)

It’s also worth remembering that the very concept of a personal carbon footprint was popularised by a wide-reaching 2005 BP media campaign. “It was the most brilliant example of ‘It’s your fault, not ours,’” says Westerwelt. “It's a framework that serves them really well because they can just say ‘Oh well, if you really care then why are you driving an SUV?’”

Rich people

Concentrating on the influence of fossil fuel companies in the failure to reduce emissions means focusing on where the supply chain starts and the push to keep extracting fossil fuels. But we can also look at where it ends – the people who consume the final products from fossil fuels, and, more specifically, those who consume a fair bit more than the rest.
Across 86 countries, the richest 10% of people consume around 20 times more energy than the poorest 10%
A recent international study from the University of Leeds calculated that, across 86 countries, the richest 10% of people consume around 20 times more energy than the poorest 10%. A big portion of this heightened consumption by richer people is through transport, the study found: flights, holidays and big cars driven long distances.

So do studies like this lay the blame for climate change at the doors of rich consumers? Yes and no, says Steinberger, who co-authored the paper.

Yes, because rich people do have far more choice in how they spend their money. “If you’re rich enough to afford a big car, you’re also rich enough not to afford a big car. If the lifestyles that rich people choose to lead are very ostentatious and wasteful, they definitely have responsibility over this,” says Steinberger. Rich people also tend to be more influential in government and in the companies driving government policy, she says. “In general, if we're talking about who has the power to make decisions, it's probably rich people in different roles.”

But also no, says Steinberger, because even high consumers live within a system that enables, and even rewards, their consumption.

People with high-carbon lifestyles live in a broader system that encourages consumption (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/Getty)

Recent events have helped put the impact of individual action into perspective. Even at the height of the coronavirus pandemic in April, with many countries in lockdown, daily global CO2 emissions fell 17% compared with 2019 levels. The drop is certainly major – emissions were temporarily comparable to 2006 levels – but the fact it was not even more gives an insight into how much deeper emissions cuts need to go than the lifestyle changes available to individual people.

The real importance of studies showing individual carbon footprints is not to point the blame at certain consumers, but to shed a light on the best way to make policies to cut emissions. For example, says Steinberger, it would be foolish to expect to drive decarbonisation of people’s homes on the basis of taxes, because home energy is a basic good that everyone needs. Large-scale public investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency would make more sense, she says.

On the other hand, taxing the luxury products rich people tend to disproportionately overconsume, such as flights, does make sense, she adds.

Rich countries

Widening out the frame from individual consumption, another way climate blame is often apportioned is by looking at which countries emit the most. The question of whether richer, historically more polluting countries should take more responsibility for climate change than others has long been a sore point at international climate negotiations.

Back in 1992, when the first international climate treaty was signed to set up a framework for future climate negotiations, it included an important – and yet, to some, still contentious – principle. The treaty acknowledged that countries had different historic responsibilities for emissions, as well as varying abilities to reduce them going forwards.
Addressing climate change requires urgent action by all people certainly, including rich and poor, but with wealthy countries taking the lead – Mohamad Adow
The world’s richest countries have released the vast majority of emissions, and many continue to emit many times more than poorer ones. The US has emitted far more CO2 than any other country: a quarter of all emissions since 1751 have occurred there. Despite China’s huge rise in emissions over the past decade, emissions per person still sit at less than half those of the US, while the one billion people living in Sub-Saharan Africa each emit one-twentieth of the average person in the US.

A quarter of all emissions since the Industrial Revolution have been in the US (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/Getty)

However, negotiations to divvy out the deep emissions cuts the world needs in a “fair” way have proven a political nightmare, with richer, more polluting countries backing out of strong commitments and talks falling through time and time again. Eventually, a different approach was developed: countries would sign up to a set of common, overarching climate goals, but self-assign their own emission reductions targets, based on whatever they felt able to promise.

This was the approach taken in the 2015 Paris Agreement, where countries agreed to limit global temperature rise to “well below 2C” and strive to limit it to 1.5C, but refrained from setting out exactly who should do what to get there. The treaty recognises that reaching peak emissions will take longer for developing than developed countries, and sets up a system for ramping up country pledges over time.

The problem is that wealthy countries still have an “emissions debt” to other countries due to their principal responsibility for climate change, argues Mohamed Adow, director of energy and climate think tank Power Shift Africa and a well-known voice at international climate conferences.

Rich polluters should not only reduce their own emissions, but also deliver on promises of finance and technology to help poorer countries develop via a lower carbon path, says Adow, as well as supporting them to deal with climate impacts which are already locked in.

“At the heart of an effective regime should be a fair process for sharing the effort between countries in a way that is sustainable,” says Adow. “Addressing climate change requires urgent action by all people certainly, including rich and poor, but with wealthy countries taking the lead.”

However, Adow is still cautious about assigning blame to richer countries. “You wouldn't want to start with a frame of going out and blaming the US,” he says. “But you will go with a frame that allows you to talk about the Earth and atmosphere as shared global commons that should be fairly enjoyed by all, including the poor, future generations and all life.”

Not all climate experts think more focus on assigning the fair share of emissions reduction to countries is the best way to ensure global emissions are cut. After all, this is the very strategy that has proven so difficult to negotiate in the past. “Basically, countries have to be seen by their peers to be doing enough, not necessarily to be perfect,” says Peters. “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.”

“Us”

Whether or not you think emissions cuts should be negotiated internationally, few would argue against the need for richer countries to take more responsibility. So what does that mean for those of us living in these rich countries? Do we all need to take more responsibility for our countries’ emissions? Are we to blame for climate change?

If you look at the system in a certain way, yes we are. For many of us, the products and energy we consume can be linked to a hefty – and unsustainable – portion of emissions.

Some researchers argue that the idea of "us" being responsible for climate change is a confusing concept (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/Getty)

But it is crucial to also acknowledge that we are all part of a bigger system that not everyone is equally complicit in holding up. “The we responsible for climate change is a fictional construct, one that’s distorting and dangerous,” writes climate scholar and author Genevieve Guenther. “By hiding who’s really responsible for our current, terrifying predicament, [the pronoun] we provides political cover for the people who are happy to let hundreds of millions of other people die for their own profit and pleasure.”

What Guenther is saying boils down to the question of who holds the power to create and change the systems that cause climate change. If you can only afford a home in an edge-of-town housing estate without access to public transport, is it really your fault for becoming dependent on a car?

“Just because you can allocate [emissions] to an entity or to a location in a supply chain, does not mean that the power of agency lies with that entity or that location in the supply chain,” says Steinberger. “If you’re thinking about these supply chains, are you going to say that final consumers actually have the final decision-making over everything that happens upstream? Who is actually taking the damaging decision?”

The question of blame is a useful one to find the most effective and fairest solutions to climate change (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/Getty)

Power differences between countries also play a strong role in the outcomes of international climate talks, says Adow. “Sadly, the countries that have the greatest historical responsibility for climate change continue to have the greatest influence on the climate regime,” he says. “They are effectively abusing their power.”

But even viewing climate inaction through this lens of power, those who have less of it can still act to confront it. Climate activist Greta Thunberg embodied this when in 2019 she told elites gathered in Davos that many of them were to blame for the climate crisis by sacrificing “priceless values” to “continue making unimaginable amounts of money”. As one academic essay puts it: “To avoid [confronting] power is to risk condoning a system that is inherently unsustainable and unjust.”

We may or may not feel that the blame for the climate crisis should be placed at someone’s door. But whether we call it blame or not, it is still crucial that we untangle the structures of power and decision-making that continue to promote climate inaction. Only by better understanding how to change these can we hope to make the emissions cuts we now need so badly.

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A Water Crisis Looms For 270 Million People As South Asia’s Glaciers Shrink

National Geographic - Alice Albinia | Photographs Brendan Hoffman

Melting ice is crucial to the thirsty Indus River region. But now the flow is projected to decline, posing risks for agriculture and a growing population.

CHINA: Pilgrims take selfies last September at Drolma La, the highest point on their 32-mile kora—a circular, meditative walk around Mount Kangrinboqe in Tibet. The mountain is sacred to four religions, and four of South Asia’s rivers rise from near its cardinal points. The source of the Indus River is a four-day walk north of the mountain.

From near Mount Kangrinboqe in Tibet rise four major rivers, which stretch east and west across the Himalaya and down to the sea like the limbs of a venerable water goddess. Where these rivers flow, they define civilizations and nations: Tibet, Pakistan, northern India, Nepal, Bangladesh. How their water is spent has long depended on the people living downstream. How the rivers are replenished depends on two things: monsoon rains and glacial ice melt. Both phenomena, for millennia the preserve of the gods, are now in the hands of humans too. (See why these 10 rivers are vital to Asia’s survival.)

Rivers emerging from the eastern Himalaya, like the Brahmaputra, are mostly fed by the summer monsoon; their flow may well increase as a warming climate puts more moisture in the atmosphere. But most water in the Indus, which flows west from Mount Kangrinboqe, comes from the snows and glaciers of the Himalaya, the Karakoram, and the Hindu Kush. Glaciers especially are “water towers”:

They store winter snowfall as ice, high in the mountains, and they surrender it as meltwater in spring and summer. In this way, they provide a steady flow that nourishes humans and ecosystems. Downstream, in the plains of Pakistan and northern India, the world’s most extensive system of irrigated agriculture depends on the Indus. The glaciers that feed it are a lifeline for some 270 million people. (The Indus River is a lifeline for millions. This map shows the threats it faces.)

INDIA: Schoolchildren in the village of Gya, Ladakh, cross a glacial stream that feeds the Indus. The river flows through Ladakh, an arid, high-altitude region in northernmost India, on its westward journey from Tibet to Pakistan. In recent decades climate change has sped up the melting of glaciers that feed the Indus, causing unprecedented flooding. In 2014 a flood from a glacial lake destroyed two houses in Gya.

Most of those glaciers are now shrinking. At first, that will increase the flow in the Indus. But if temperatures rise as predicted, and the glaciers continue to melt back, the Indus will reach “peak water” by 2050. After that, the flow will decline.

Humans already use 95 percent of the Indus, and the population of the basin is growing fast. Writing recently in the journal Nature, an international group of scientists (supported by the National Geographic Society) analyzed glacial water towers worldwide. The Indus is the most critical, they said: Given the region’s “high baseline water stress and limited government effectiveness,” it is “unlikely that the Indus … can sustain this pressure.” Pakistan will suffer most.

From 2003 to 2006, I traveled the 2,000-mile river, from the Arabian Sea to its source in Tibet, researching my book Empires of the Indus. Already it was clear that it was under strain. The Indus had changed out of all recognition from the mighty river described by British colonial officials. It had been diminished by the demands of irrigation, industry, and daily life. Because of dams and barrages, it no longer reached the sea, and its mangrove-forested delta was dying. Its lakes were polluted with effluents and sewage.

PAKISTAN: The ice-fed torrent of the mountains spreads to its full breadth in the plains of Sindh in southern Pakistan. The barrage at Sukkur, visible in the distance, was built during colonial times. It funnels Indus water into a network of canals to irrigate crops such as cotton, wheat, and rice in the desert. Along the Indus, the British created what is still the world’s largest irrigation system.

I was struck by how the Indus, celebrated from ancient times in sacred Sanskrit hymns, was treated as a resource but no longer as an object of reverence. Everyone I met, from peasants to politicians, thought the river was being mismanaged. They spoke of corrupt or inefficient engineering projects, inequitable water sharing, and ecosystems destroyed in the name of profit.

At the time, not many people were talking about the effect of global warming on the Indus. It wasn’t until 2010 that the scale of the problem became clear—through dramatic floods rather than a shortage. The future of total rainfall in the Himalayan region is uncertain, but there has been a clear increase in extreme rains. In August 2010, when the Indus was already full of summer meltwater, it was hit by a freak monsoon. The torrential rain—in some places, a year’s worth in a few hours—caused the river to breach its banks throughout its southern course. More than 1,600 people died; damages reached $10 billion.

“Flooding on that scale was unheard of,” said Usman Qazi, an Islamabad-based disaster-relief expert with the United Nations Development Programme. “But it will become more common,” he added. “Climate change–related floods are one of the biggest hazards in this country..

CHINA: Nomad children fetch water from the Indus near its source in Tibet. China controls the headwaters of the river. In 2006 it constructed a dam without informing India and Pakistan, which heavily depend on the river. 

This is the starkest difference since I wrote my book: The specter of climate change now haunts all discussions of the future of the Indus. The challenge is made infinitely more complex because the Indus and five of its tributaries are shared by India and Pakistan, neighbors and enemies since 1947, while China controls the headwaters. When I reached Tibet in 2006, on my journey to the source, I was shocked to find that there was no water in the Indus: China had recently dammed the river’s upper reaches.

India, Pakistan, and China have huge populations and abundant reasons to protect their resources. All three have nuclear weapons. We think of climate change as happening in increments, almost imperceptibly. But along the Indus, it could trigger a conflict that changes the world overnight.

There was a time when humans were so grateful for rivers, they made them into divinities.

In the Rig Veda, India’s most ancient Sanskrit text, the Indus is the only river worshipped as both god and goddess, father and mother—probably because it was here, in the Indus Valley, that Hinduism took its first form, experts believe.

TIBET: A pilgrim from Atlanta, Georgia, is doused with the sacred waters of Lake Manasarovar in Tibet, near Mount Kangrinboqe and the source of the Indus. Thousands of pilgrims trek around the mountain each year, but the Chinese government has banned bathing in the lake.

North of Kangrinboqe, the great river bubbles modestly out of the ground, as if that four-armed goddess were breathing out. It runs west through the mountains, along the top of India, and across the disputed border into Pakistan. Where the Himalaya meets the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush, in a knot of stone and ice, the river makes a sharp left and is funneled south, a thousand miles through the plains of Punjab and Sindh to the Arabian Sea.

About 40 miles north of that turning point, in the valley of the Hunza, an Indus tributary, I walked onto Ghulkin, a glacier with orchards and villages on either side. It was black with dirt and rubble from the mountains. I stepped over creaking crevasses; with my fingers I touched the ice body itself. From the summit, the view was exhilarating. The torrential brown river cut its way through the valley. Leading down to it were exquisite strips of psychedelic green, fields and orchards in which every leaf is watered by irrigation channels connected directly to the glacier.

In northern Pakistan, Islamic monotheism manages to coexist with a shamanistic appreciation of glaciers’ power. I was told many times that Ghulkin was a male glacier, “advancing down the valley in search of a female mate”—that is, a retreating glacier—in a mystical courtship dance. Glaciers advance, local people said, because they’re accumulating mass. That’s true—but as I learned later from glacial geologist Bethan Davies at Royal Holloway in London, a glacier also can slide downhill like a child’s sled because it has started to melt and come unstuck.

INDIA: Leh is the largest town in Ladakh, and its population typically more than doubles in summer with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Indian and foreign tourists. In 2019 the Indian government assumed direct control of Ladakh, which could lead to increased development by outside interests.

That may be what happened in 2018 to Shishper, another glacier nearby: It suddenly began sliding toward the town of Hassanabad, advancing as much as 120 feet a day. “It looked like a train,” local geologist Deedar Karim told me. Shishper rolled over irrigation channels and crashed into a bridge. By the time I saw it last October, it had slowed to a foot a day—which is still fast for a glacier.

In the upper Indus Basin, glaciers no longer advance or retreat glacially. The Hoper and Barpu Glaciers have melted back so far that settlements and their laboriously constructed irrigation networks have been drained. You see them abandoned on the mountainside: houses the same soft brown as the dry hills. “They were cultivating fields and trees there in my childhood,” said Niat Ali, a 60-year-old ex-army man. He reeled off a list of defunct settlements: Shishkin, Hapa Kun, Hamdar, Barpu Giram.

INDIA: Tourism has boomed in recent years in Ladakh, which has become a summer refuge for heat-stressed Indians. These vacationers are at the confluence of the Indus and Zaskar Rivers, west of Leh.

Melting glaciers also present a more urgent threat. Sometimes the meltwater pools behind a dam of rock rubble or ice—which can explode, unleashing a “glacial lake outburst flood,” or GLOF. In 2018, in the Ishkuman Valley, a flood submerged the villages of Bad Swat and Bilhanz. Nayab Khan, 48, felt the land shaking as “the water brought huge boulders. The boulders were colliding. It continued for 12 days.” The debris dammed the Immit River, forming a new lake, 20 feet deep, that destroyed his home and 41 others.

Climate change has helped put seven million people in northern Pakistan at risk of such floods. The three glaciers near the village of Pasu “are the three dragons,” said Ashraf Khan, an apple farmer and teacher. “We are living in their mouths.” In 2008 one dragon unleashed a GLOF in winter, when “normally everything is frozen solid.” Last August, summer meltwater “washed away a hotel, an office of the Pakistan Army’s intelligence bureau, and an orchard..

INDIA: A roadside café in Jammu and Kashmir looks out over the Baglihar Dam on the Chenab River, a major Indus tributary. Under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, Pakistan was granted use of the waters of the Indus, Chenab, and Jhelum Rivers—but India is allowed certain rights, including electricity generation. 

The villagers of Pasu, like everybody else in the north, can see the weather is changing. The summers are now so hot that for the first time in their lives, people are ordering fans from downcountry. The winters are milder, for which most seem grateful. The gold panners who migrate to Hunza seasonally, living in tents along the river, celebrate the warmer weather—even the floods.

“The floods bring more minerals out from the rocks,” Mahboob Khan explained. He was sieving sand from freezing river water, then rolling it with toxic mercury in his palm to extract specks of gold. He didn’t care about climate change.

INDIA: Linemen connect a house to the grid in Saboo, Ladakh. The Indian government has promoted hydroelectric developments in the Indus Basin, at huge cost and with great environmental impact—but also benefits. In 2013 Leh, Ladakh’s capital, replaced diesel generators with cleaner hydroelectricity.

I was astonished by how few people I met in northern Pakistan knew what was melting their glaciers or blamed the rest of the world. Farther south, in the big cities, a sense of injustice is crystallizing. Pakistan, a developing country of about 230 million, ranks only 144th out of 192 countries in per capita greenhouse gas emissions. As Pakistan’s climate change minister, Malik Amin Aslam, put it to me: “It’s not because of us, yet we are bearing the brunt..

When independence was declared in 1947, and the Partition of the old British colony created India and Pakistan, each country got less of the Indus than it wanted. The long, westward-flowing stretch in the north lies in the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, and both new countries wanted all of that. The border dividing Kashmir remains tensely disputed.

Downstream in the fertile plains of Punjab, the British had built dams and barrages on the Indus and its tributaries and diverted water from those headworks into a vast web of irrigation canals. In Punjab the new border cut through five tributaries, giving Pakistan most of the farming settlements around the canals but leaving India with the headworks at Firozpur, on the Sutlej River.

INDIA: Left - A nursery in Sichewali, Punjab, cultivates native plants that can serve to green the landscape and allow underground aquifers to recharge. Groundwater reserves in Punjab have been seriously depleted in part by flood irrigation of rice, which was introduced to the region in the 1960s, during the green revolution. Right - Balbir Singh Seechewal, a Sikh environmentalist, shows off the water treatment plant he built in Sichewali after deciding that pollution threatened spiritual as well as physical health. The founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak, had an epiphany after bathing in a river.

Officials on the Indian side asserted their power immediately in spring 1948, shutting the gates of the headworks. That sharply reduced the flow into Pakistan. The gates reopened after a few weeks. But as Majed Akhter, a geographer at King’s College London, told me, that experience of Indian willfulness is the “founding violence” for Pakistani officials. Last October, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi threatened to cut the flow again.

Pakistan got some reassurance in 1960, when the World Bank persuaded both countries to sign the Indus Waters Treaty. The treaty divided the river basin, awarding water in the Indus and two western tributaries to Pakistan, with the three eastern tributaries going to India. The international community pushed the countries to build more dams and canals. Pakistan completed the Tarbela Reservoir in 1976. India finished the 400-mile Indira Gandhi Canal in 1987 to carry water and the green revolution from the Punjab south as far as Rajasthan’s Thar Desert.

PAKISTAN: In the northern mountains, the Shishper Glacier, black with rubble, surged into pipes and other infrastructure in 2018. The surge may have been triggered by accelerated melting.

Analysts in both countries agree that the canals, by providing copious water at artificially low cost, encourage waste. “We grow paddy in the desert!” exclaimed Ali Tauqeer Sheikh, a member of Pakistan’s National Climate Change Council. But “100 years on, we can’t keep blaming the British.” Large farmers, he said, are “the political elite and simply refuse water pricing..

Water shortages on both sides of the border are at crisis levels. In India’s Punjab, debt drives about a thousand farmers to suicide every year. Pumping groundwater is expensive; every year they have to bore deeper wells as the water table falls—to 400 feet in some places. The groundwater depletion is caused by the growing of rice, a thirsty crop. Meanwhile, river water is shipped away as far as Rajasthan.

Across the border from Rajasthan, in the Pakistani province of Sindh, I traveled to a canal-irrigated part of the Thar Desert. The irrigation water was coming from nearly 200 miles away—from the barrage at Sukkur on the Indus, built in 1932 by the British. Here, at the end of the canal system, women and children were out in the fields, harvesting the famous Dundicut chili. In the open-air chili market of Kunri, the biggest in Pakistan, my eyes watered as I watched mountains of vivid red fruits being auctioned.

PAKISTAN: In Wagah, Punjab, visitors pose with soldiers following the elaborate daily closing ceremony on the border with India. In 1947, when two independent countries were created from British India, the province of Punjab was divided down the middle. For the two Punjabs, as for the two nations, Indus Basin water is a prime source of tension.

But the 2019 harvest was a dud, explained Mian Saleem, president of Sindh’s Red Chillies Growers Association: Extreme weather had cut the yield by two-thirds. In May the temperature reached 117 degrees, withering the crop. “In 40 years, I never felt such heat,” Saleem said. Then came “rain in October for the first time in my life.” Picking was delayed, and the fruit rotted.

In the village of Rano Khan Rahimoon, I spoke with landless sharecroppers, Hindus and Muslims living side by side in painted mud-walled houses. They grow chilies and other cash crops, and they were eloquent about their biggest problem: water. “Sometimes the canal water comes, sometimes it doesn’t,” said Attam Kumar, 28.

PAKISTAN: A truck delivers cotton to a textile factory in Sindh. The textile industry as a whole accounts for 8 percent of Pakistan’s GDP and more than half of its foreign exchange earnings. But cotton is a water-intensive crop, and in recent years, erratic weather patterns—heat waves followed by unusually heavy rains—have resulted in low yields.

“The problem is threefold,” he went on. “Scarcity of canal water, unusually heavy monsoons, and this poisoned groundwater we are forced to drink.” Wells, he said, have been contaminated by runoff from fertilized fields. Kumar pulled up the shirt of Salaam, an 11-year-old boy, to show me the scar from his kidney surgery. Four of the 150 villagers have had kidneys removed. “This poison is shortening our lives,” Kumar said.

The next morning I took tea with a landowner and former federal minister, then spoke with the manager of a 6,000-acre mango farm, where servants were watering a rose garden in the desert. Both men lamented the newly erratic weather as they cracked open bottles of Evian. But they weren’t worried about running short of canal water; they were powerful enough to be given what they needed.

PAKISTAN: Left - After wheat, cotton occupies more land than any other crop in Pakistan, and women and girls pick most of it. In the process many are exposed to high levels of pesticides and suffer a range of health problems. These women are working at Tibba Sultanpur in Punjab. Right - Fabric from factories such as this one at Khurrianwala, Punjab, contributes more than half of Pakistan’s foreign exchange earnings. But a lot of scarce groundwater is “embedded” in the exported material: It takes more than 2,000 gallons to produce a pound of raw cotton.


PAKISTAN: Children collect drinking water from a filtration plant on the shores of Manchhar Lake, Sindh. Pakistan’s largest freshwater lake, it’s fed by the Indus. But water diversions upstream have caused it to stagnate, while agricultural runoff draining into the lake has killed most fish and made the water too polluted to drink without treatment.
After a delicious lunch at the mango farm, I stopped by the village hospital. The doctor, Moomal Waqar, was in despair about the number of patients with kidney and gallstone ailments. Like the sharecroppers, she blamed unfiltered drinking water polluted by fertilizer. “Who here,” she asked, “can afford mineral water bottles?.

Poisoned water is widespread in Pakistan. A team led by Joel Podgorski of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology reported in 2017 that up to 60 million people in the Indus Basin may drink groundwater contaminated by arsenic. The arsenic is naturally present in soils; it may also come from fertilizers. It gets leached into the aquifer by heavy irrigation.

“Arsenic poisoning exactly matches the irrigated areas,” said Hassan Abbas, a hydrogeologist in Punjab. “We have poisoned one of the largest groundwater reserves in the world..

Pakistan also has one of the world’s highest rates of childhood malnutrition—at least a third of all children suffer from it. The country’s highest rates of all, said Daanish Mustafa, a Pakistani geographer at King’s College London, are “in the irrigated districts,” where agricultural practice prioritizes export crops over food security.

PAKISTAN: In Karachi, on the Arabian Sea, a driver drains water piped from the Indus into his truck—legally, in this case. But a thriving black market leads to dire shortages for the poor.

All these problems come back to the way water is used in the Indus plains. Dams, barrages, and canals made water abundant and cheap while trapping much of the river’s fertile silt in the reservoirs. The green revolution in the 1960s and 1970s brought even thirstier hybrid crops, along with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Flood irrigation requires lots of both, because standing water is a vector of insect pests and because the water washes the chemicals away—into groundwater. The result, according to Abbas, is that “we now take 10 times more water from the river than we need to.” Water is scarce and contaminated in a land where it was once plentiful and clean.

Like many water experts I spoke with, Abbas advocates a radical overhaul of the system. Both Pakistan and India have ancient water-harvesting traditions, adapted to the rhythms of the river and the rains, that have been neglected since British times. Instead the two countries have focused on huge engineering projects—on dams and canals. Both have plans for new dams in the Indus Basin.

Climate change, Abbas argues, could be a blessing for Pakistan—an incentive to rethink the system. It could transition from expensive hydroelectric dams to cheaper solar power. It could replace flood irrigation with drip irrigation from pipes tapping into an unpolluted aquifer under the Indus. Finally, it could restore wetlands and forests in a corridor along the Indus and its tributaries. They would absorb floodwaters, thus avoiding a repeat of the 2010 disaster, and at the same time recharge the aquifers. Dams and reservoirs provide Pakistan with only 30 days’ supply in a drought; the Indus aquifer alone has enough water for three years, Abbas calculates.

PAKISTAN: Left - With so much Indus water diverted for irrigation, fishermen in Keti Bandar, on the edge of the Indus Delta, must take their small boats into the Arabian Sea to catch fish. Some families have migrated away from the once prosperous village. Right - At his farm in Sindh, Abdul Qadir Palari makes the blue for jeans from indigo. It’s a native plant that is drought tolerant—unlike cotton, which sucks up a lot of Indus water.

He thinks rainfall- and river-water capture might even recharge the aquifer under Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial capital. On the edge of the Indus Delta, it’s one of the world’s largest water-stressed cities: Fifteen million people have sucked its aquifer dry. Kinjhar Lake, an Indus-fed reservoir 60 miles away, is their nearest source.

By the time the river nears the sea, it has almost ceased existing. In an alley in Goth Ibrahim Haidri, a fishing village near Karachi, I passed a line of women waiting with their waterpots for a tank truck. They said they’d been waiting for three days. Such scenes are common in low-income neighborhoods here. The rich take the lion’s share of freshwater from the Indus and its lakes, often buying it illegally. The poor wait in line or buy cheaper, brackish water.

Many residents of Goth Ibrahim Haidri are migrants from the delta. Their ancestral home was ruined from two directions. Since the Ghulam Muhammad Barrage was constructed in 1955, the Indus has flowed down to the sea only weakly, fitfully; instead, boosted by climate change, the sea has risen to meet the river, rendering it salty far upstream.

PAKISTAN: Houseboat residents on Manchhar Lake traditionally disguise themselves with decoys to hunt birds. But the fish have mostly gone from the polluted lake, and migratory birds are also less abundant, so most of the people have left too. Fewer than 50 houseboats are left; once there were many thousands.


At sunset I stood by the sea watching the pretty wooden fishing boats come into harbor. Like Pakistan’s trucks, they were painted in a riot of colors, adorned with flowers and fish. Mohammad Ali Shah, head of the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum (PFF), grew up here and swam in this sea as a child. He would never let his grandchildren do so, he said—it’s far too polluted.

PFF is campaigning for a law that would grant personhood—and rights—to the Indus. Shah showed me a draft. It calls the Indus “an ecological marvel” with “value aside from its utility to humans.” It points out that the Quran calls all the Earth “a mosque.” It proposes checks on hydro projects, pollution controls, and a fund to restore the river.

The proposal is too radical to become law. But something needs to shift along the Indus; something like the old reverence needs to return. The alternative, in which the river continues to be squandered and new weather gods add to the chaos, is too scary to contemplate.

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