Living Indus

One of the world’s three earliest civilizations thrived around it. It has sustained Pakistan for more than 5,000 years. Ninety percent of the country’s economy depends on it, with 80 percent of Pakistan’s arable lands irrigated by its waters. For you reading this, you may have made a journey around it or seen the Indus River in photographs.

An unhealthy Indus Basin is unaffordable for a nation like Pakistan, which the Global Climate Risk Index ranks as the eighth most vulnerable country to climate change. Pakistan is currently experiencing an age of adaptation, with major water issues brought on by climate change due to the unpredictable nature of melting glaciers and the nature of monsoons that threaten floods.

With the ecology of the Indus system facing grave challenges, the Living Indus Initiative was developed by the Ministry of Climate Change and the United Nations in Pakistan under the directives of the Prime Minister’s Committee on Climate Change for the Government of Pakistan in 2021. The initiative aims to restore more than 30 percent of Pakistan’s Indus River Basin by 2030 by boosting biodiversity, climate mitigation, and community resilience through nature-based solutions. Recently, this project was named one of the seven United Nations (UN) World Restoration Flagships – awards which are part of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration – led by the UN Environment Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN – which aims to prevent, halt, and reverse the degradation of ecosystems on every continent and in every ocean.

“Given its breadth and scale, encompassing a whole country and its future, the Indus River initiative stands out for its ambitious impact. Restoration efforts include river health improvement, biodiversity conservation, habitat restoration, pollution reduction, and sustainable water management across the entire river basin. These efforts enhance biodiversity and ecosystem resilience and contribute to carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation,” says Humaira Jahanzeb, Team Lead of the Living Indus Initiative.
With six years left until 2030, is the project on track to achieve its targets? Jahanzeb, the project’s team lead, mentions, “The Living Indus is a long-term programme that is spread over the next 10 to 15 years, entailing 25 interventions that have been assigned implementation time frames – long, medium and short term. The programme itself does not set a target of 2030, but for much longer, as it will realistically need decades to restore the basin, but it sets some targets in each intervention for 2030. The interventions are classified across multiple parameters, such as their connection to meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Pakistan’s Nationally Determined Contributions. Each of the 25 interventions specifies which of the 17 SDGs the intervention meets.”

World Restoration Projects – a case of global optics?
Landing in the League of World Restoration Projects, one may ask whether these projects are mere optics or carry some weight. Dr. Saeed Ud Din Ahmed, Associate Professor, Department of Architecture and Planning at the NED University of Engineering and Technology, says, “World Restoration Projects do have weight, at least the importance of it, in theory, and logic, cannot be challenged. Such top-down approaches do have good budget allocations as well. However, the debate should be about whether such projects can bring a change while dealing with projects involving environment, ecology, and communities, which requires the active involvement of the communities at the grassroots level.”

For Dr. Saeed, any top-down project needs similar support from the bottom up to make it sustainable, even when the project is over and the funding has finished. “Such projects need to have a sustainability component, especially in terms of empowering the locals to take the lead in the future,” he added.

“Communities are at the heart of our work on restoring the basin’s health,” stresses Jahanzeb, the Living Indus initiative’s lead. “The idea and scope of the Indus was refined through a series of consultations at the provincial and district levels – through a rigorous dialogue with communities and those most affected by climate change, including women and the youth. Within the list of parameters used to explain each of the interventions, a key legend around the community metre measures the level of engagement with communities required to implement the intervention, with most requiring a high level of engagement with communities.”