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There is a Pakistani Taliban organization. What will they try to do, now that their pals in Afghanistan have won? And what will Imran Khan say about THAT?
Where do you think Pakistan will be in 5 years?
I think within the next 5-10 years one of the biggest challenges that Pakistan will be facing will be access to clean freshwater.
This February 2019 letter published in Environmental Science and Pollution Research summarizes the alarming situation:
“According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Pakistan ranked third among the countries facing severe water shortage. In May 2018, the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) announced that by 2025, there will be very little or no clean water available in the country (Shukla 2018). It must be noted that while per capita availability in the 1950s was approximately 5000 m3 per annum, it has now declined to below 1000 m3, which is an internationally recognized threshold of water scarcity (Aziz et al. 2018). Currently, only 20% of the country’s population has access to clean drinking water. The remaining 80% populations depends on polluted water primarily contaminated by sewerage (fecal, total coliforms, E. coli colonies), and secondarily by fertilizer, pesticides, and industrial effluents (Daud et al. 2017; Sahoutara 2017). Such water pollution is responsible for approximately 80% of all diseases and 30% of deaths (Daud et al. 2017). In the dried-out pipeline, a single E. coli bacterium can multiply into trillions in just a week (Ebrahim 2017), and such pipes are used for the water supply without any treatment. Consuming such polluted waters has not only resulted in the death of several people, but also cause bone and teeth diseases, diarrhea, dysentery, typhoid, hepatitis, cancer, and other waterborne diseases (Daud et al. 2017). According to World Health Organization (WHO), waterborne diarrheal diseases are responsible for over 2 million deaths annually across the world, with the majority occurring in children under 5 years (WHO 2018).
In Pakistan, approximately 60 million people are at risk of being affected by high concentrations of arsenic in drinking water; the largest mass poisoning in history (Guglielmi 2017). Arsenic poisoning can cause cancer, restrictive pulmonary disease, skin lesions, cardiovascular problems, diabetes mellitus, gangrene, neurological impairments, and problems in endocrine glands, immunity, liver, kidney, and bladder as well as socio-economic hazards (Rahman et al. 2018). Unfortunately, still, no epidemiological data of arsenic poisoning, alternate drinking water, and health interventions are available to the people at risk.
Taking into consideration the drought-hit deaths of approximately 1832 children in the last 4 years (The Newspaper’s Staff Reporter 2018), drying lakes (Ali 2015), rivers (Channa 2010), lowering water table, excessive use of water, lack of storage mechanism, population explosion, and climatic changes warrant serious attention (Kirby 2018). Furthermore, the lack of sound national water policy, lack of federal and provincial government’s interest, water conflict between nuclear-armed Pakistan and India (Kirby 2018), deforestation, the overwhelming potential threat to the country’s glacier reserves (Nabi et al. 2017, 2018), and the poor water supply will likely negatively affect agriculture, ecology, and local biodiversity. The wildlife has already entered the red zone (Shaikh 2018) and can possibly turn into human crisis with the danger of large-scale regional migration of people due to drought-like situation.”
Link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11356-019-04483-w