A European water partnership with South Asia

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Abstract

[...] European institutions have developed important initiatives on water management – for example the ‘water framework directive’ – and in 2016 a water partnership with India was promoted. Some attention has also been paid to some other critical situations of Himalayan-originated water basins, such as the Aral Sea crisis or the Mekong River. Still, there is a prevailing lack of understanding and political relevance given to the issue of water management in South Asia and elsewhere. This surfaced in the European declaration on the recently celebrated water day (22 of March), which oddly opens with considerations on the present pandemics and continuously downgrades the importance of water management, as if water could be thought as a mere chapter of the ‘climate urgency’. Actually, water has ceased to be an issue solely dependent of climate many thousands of years ago and to tone it down as a mere consequence of ‘climate change’ is a disservice to an understanding of the challenges we are confronted with. In the name of a new ‘urgency’, most basic historical facts that have conditioned human relations with water have been forgotten or downplayed. It is therefore necessary to have them in mind when looking at the challenges posed to the World’s most important water basins, those originating in the Himalaya Mountainous system. The two main Himalayan water basins running towards South Asia are the Indus, home to around 300 million people, and the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna rivers basin where an estimated 630 million people live. Although some of the regions covered by these basins are in China, the vast majority of the population residing within these basins belongs to South Asian countries – in fact we can say that over half the population of South Asia lives in these two basins. Only two members of South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the islands of Sri Lanka and the Maldives, have no connection with them. The comparison of Europe and South Asia on water issues enhances the potential for Euro-South-Asian cooperation in water governance as regards the immediate issues at stake in the water-land-food-energy-urbanisation system of connections. Other less direct issues include potential climate impacts of greenhouse gases resulting from water mismanagement. [...]