Water treaties matter most when politics is at its worst. That is why India’s decision of 23 April 2025 to place the Indus Waters Treaty in “abeyance” deserves attention far beyond South Asia. New Delhi linked the move to allegations of Pakistani support for cross-border terrorism, which Islamabad denies. Yet whatever the wider security dispute, turning a shared river system into an instrument of pressure crosses a dangerous threshold. The Indus question is now a test of whether transboundary water arrangements can remain insulated from political coercion amid worsening climate stress.
The Indus Waters Treaty was built around a durable idea. Rivals do not need political agreement to cooperate hydrologically. Brokered with World Bank involvement in 1960, it allocated the eastern and western rivers while establishing the Permanent Indus Commission, information exchange and dispute-settlement mechanisms. It survived wars, military crises and diplomatic breakdowns. Its value therefore goes beyond water allocation.
It created predictability between two nuclear-armed neighbours and showed that technical cooperation could continue when wider relations failed
That principle is now under strain. International treaty law rests on pacta sunt servanda, the expectation that agreements in force are performed in good faith. India’s “abeyance” position therefore raises questions larger than the bilateral dispute. In June 2025, the Court of Arbitration constituted under the treaty held that India’s unilateral position did not limit the Court’s competence in proceedings already under way. The institutional implication is serious. If governments can disable treaty mechanisms whenever relations deteriorate, negotiated settlements everywhere become less dependable.
The most immediate danger is not necessarily stopping water. It is creating uncertainty. Hydrological information tells downstream authorities how much water is moving, when releases may occur, how reservoirs should be operated and when flood risks are rising. After India placed the treaty in abeyance, routine treaty-based information exchange was disrupted. During severe flooding later in 2025, Pakistan argued that warnings sent through diplomatic channels were less timely and detailed than information previously available through treaty mechanisms, while India maintained that relevant warnings were being passed. The episode demonstrated why institutionalised data-sharing matters.
For Pakistan, this is inseparable from food security. The Indus system supports most of the country’s irrigated agriculture. Farmers, irrigation departments, reservoir managers and disaster authorities depend on predictable flows and timely information. An upstream information gap can distort planting decisions, complicate irrigation scheduling, reduce reservoir efficiency and weaken flood preparedness. A river does not become less important because governments are quarrelling. The more unstable the political relationship, the stronger the need for reliable technical channels.
Reuters reported after the April 2025 decision that the treaty-governed rivers support roughly 80 percent of Pakistan’s farms, illustrating how quickly hydrological uncertainty can become economic uncertainty
Climate change makes this even more consequential. South Asian hydrology is increasingly exposed to extreme rainfall, drought, glacial change and shifting seasonal patterns that complicate forecasting. In such an environment, degrading information exchange does more than create diplomatic inconvenience. It magnifies climate vulnerability. A hazard that should be managed through shared monitoring and early warning can become a security crisis. International experience points in the opposite direction. UNECE identifies shared information systems, data exchange and cross-border cooperation as important tools for improving preparedness for climate-related extremes.
The global implications are substantial. UN-Water says transboundary waters account for about 60 percent of the world’s freshwater flows, with 153 countries having territory within at least one of 286 transboundary river and lake basins and 592 transboundary aquifer systems. Yet only 43 countries have operational arrangements covering 90 percent or more of their shared waters. Global water governance is already incomplete. A precedent in which an upstream state treats information-sharing or treaty cooperation as political leverage could encourage similar conduct in contested basins elsewhere.
There is also a strategic contradiction for India. A country seeking greater influence in international institutions and a larger role in shaping global governance cannot easily separate that ambition from its conduct toward neighbouring states. Making a long-standing water arrangement conditional on broader political demands risks creating doubts about whether institutional obligations will survive future crises. The reputational cost is therefore not merely bilateral.
Downstream states elsewhere will judge major powers partly by how they behave when geography gives them disproportionate leverage over shared natural resources
The international community should consequently view the Indus dispute as a warning about the future of shared rivers. The issue is not whether India and Pakistan have serious security disagreements. They plainly do. The question is whether water, hydrological data and disaster-warning mechanisms should become instruments within those disputes. They should not. Shared rivers require legal continuity, technical transparency and functioning institutions precisely because geography cannot be suspended when diplomacy fails. UN-Water similarly warns that poorly managed transboundary waters can contribute to social instability and conflict, while cooperation becomes even more important where climate pressures and scarcity are increasing.
India should restore treaty-based cooperation, resume meaningful hydrological information exchange and pursue disagreements through established legal and institutional mechanisms. Pakistan should simultaneously strengthen domestic water efficiency, storage, forecasting and climate adaptation so that external uncertainty does not compound internal vulnerability. But the broader principle must remain clear. When upstream geography is converted into coercive leverage, the damage does not stop at a border. It reaches farms, food markets, disaster zones, treaty law and ultimately international peace.
