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13.12.2023
Swiss Press Award 24 Online – E – Team Neue Zürcher Zeitung NZZ
How Pakistan’s Lifeline is Slowly Drying Up
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
2024
Andreas Babst / Rebecca Conway / Roland Shaw / Alex Kräuchi
3rd place 2024
The report follows a journey along the Indus River in Pakistan, which runs approximately 1,500 kilometres from the Passu Glacier to the coastal city of Karachi. “There is no better place to get an understanding of the way people’s lives here have gone out of kilter,” writes the author. Ever increasing temperatures are melting the glaciers and yet the river is carrying less and less water. Built up with dams and weirs, it feeds an extensive irrigation system, earning it its title of Pakistan’s Lifeline. The threat is that it will one day dry up completely. People on the Indus tell of their worries and hardships: an engineer who operates the locks and only experiences either droughts or floods; or a fisherman who can barely survive on his meagre catch. According to a hydrologist: “We have thrown the river out of balance”. In addition to the increasing use of river water by the growing population, climate change with its record heat waves and heavy rainfalls is making Pakistan one of the most inhospitable countries in the world.