Restoring the Indus, Pakistan’s lifeline
The Indus River and its tributaries have nurtured human civilization on the Indian sub-continent since the Bronze Age.
Several millennia later, modern-day Pakistan still depends heavily on the river for water, food, jobs – even the country’s identity – as it flows 3,000 kilometres from the Tibetan Plateau to the Arabian Sea.
But the Indus and the vast Himalayan glaciers that feed it have come to pose an increasingly unpredictable threat: deadly floods, exacerbated by climate change, have struck the river basin repeatedly in recent years.
Those disasters, along with growing concern about environmental degradation, have added urgency to the Living Indus initiative, an ambitious effort to restore the river’s ailing ecosystems and secure the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. Restoration measures are wide-ranging: they cover everything from growing mangroves in the Indus delta to grafting glaciers high in the mountains.
To date, the Living Indus initiative has restored more than 1 million hectares, with plans to bring 25 million hectares under restoration by 2030.
“Pakistan’s climate-induced disasters in recent years have been heart-breaking, causing destruction on a scale that no nation can, or should have to, accept,” said Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which leads the UN Decade along with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
“It is therefore important to recognize and support projects like the Living Indus initiative for the hope and resilience it can offer Pakistan and the region,” Andersen added.
Launched in 2021, Living Indus aims to scale up efforts to protect the natural resources of the Indus Basin, which is home to 90 percent of Pakistan’s people and irrigates 80 percent of its arable land. A major goal is to make the country more resilient in the face of climate change.
As well as securing water supplies for homes, farms and factories, the initiative aims to restore 40 per cent of the Indus basin within Pakistan by 2030 and to create more than 200,000 green jobs. Some 1.3 million hectares have already been restored, for instance through reforestation and the establishment of protected areas – moves that can help protect endangered wildlife from snow leopards to river dolphins.
Legal Disclaimer:
EIN Presswire provides this news content "as is" without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above.
