The International Risk Podcast

Episode 272: The Indus at Risk: Floods, Fragility and the Future of Water Security in Pakistan with Dr. Erum Sattar

• Dominic Bowen • Episode 272

Share episode

Pakistan is once again underwater.

In the country’s north—specifically the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa—torrential monsoon rains dropped 150 millimeters in under an hour. That’s six inches of rain, fast enough to overwhelm any drainage system. But here, it didn’t just flood streets—it destroyed entire communities. At least 700 people are dead. Over 100 are missing. And in Bishnoi village, 50% of all homes are gone—flattened or washed away.

This isn’t just bad weather. It’s a lethal convergence of natural vulnerability and systemic fragility: hilly terrain, deforestation, poor infrastructure, and collapsing governance capacity. Add climate change, and Pakistan—already one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations—is facing a catastrophe that’s becoming alarmingly routine.

On today’s episode of The International Risk Podcast, we’re not just discussing weather patterns. We’re talking about how extreme climate events are redrawing the map of risk—impacting state stability, migration flows, food security, and the future of regional cooperation.

Today, we are joined by Dr. Erum Sattar, LLB, LLM, SJD, a Pakistani legal scholar specialising in water law amidst global environmental and institutional challenges. She is a lecturer and former Program Director of the Sustainable Water Management Program at Tufts University in Boston. She holds degrees from Harvard Law School, Queen Mary University and the University of London. Dr Sattar is a Member of the Bar of England and Wales, as well as The Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn. Her interdisciplinary research examines the impact of water governance and transboundary water sharing on food production, livelihoods and migration, highlighting the legal and institutional adaptation structures required at a global level. She has an upcoming chapter on International Water Law and its history, application and future in Pakistan and is also co-editor of the upcoming The Cambridge Handbook of Islam and Environmental Law. 

The International Risk Podcast brings you conversations with global experts, frontline practitioners, and senior decision-makers who are shaping how we understand and respond to international risk. From geopolitical volatility and organised crime, to cybersecurity threats and hybrid warfare, each episode explores the forces transforming our world and what smart leaders must do to navigate them. Whether you’re a board member, policymaker, or risk professional, The International Risk Podcast delivers actionable insights, sharp analysis, and real-world stories that matter.

Dominic Bowen is the host of The International Risk Podcast and Europe’s leading expert on international risk and crisis management. As Head of Strategic Advisory and Partner at one of Europe’s leading risk management consulting firms, Dominic advises CEOs, boards, and senior executives across the continent on how to prepare for uncertainty and act with intent. He has spent decades working in war zones, advising multinational companies, and supporting Europe's business leaders. Dominic is the go-to business advisor for leaders navigating risk, crisis, and strategy; trusted for his clarity, calmness under pressure, and ability to turn volatility into competitive advantage. Dominic equips today’s business leaders with the insight and confidence to lead through disruption and deliver sustained strategic advantage.


Tell us what you liked!

Dr Erum Sattar  0:00  
I think we really have to start thinking about our human impact on the environment, and then the environments impact back on humans. 

Elisa Garbil  0:10  
Welcome back to The International risk podcast, where we discuss the latest World News and significant events that impact businesses and organizations worldwide. 

Dominic Bowen  0:19  
Hi. I'm Dominic Bowen, host of the International whisk podcast, today, Pakistan is once again underwater in the country's north, torrential monsoon rains have dropped about 150 millimeters in just one hour, and the rain has continued now. That's fast enough to overwhelm any drainage system, but here in the North of Pakistan, it didn't just flood streets. It's really devastated entire communities, with some villages completely washed away. According to the current statistics, there's at least 700 people dead and hundreds of people missing. And this isn't just about bad weather. It's this lethal convergence of vulnerabilities, systemic fragility, hilly terrain, deforestation, poor infrastructure, and potentially also some governance capacity issues. Now if we add climate change to that, and we consider that Pakistan is already one of the world's most climate vulnerable nations, this really is a catastrophe that's becoming alarmingly routine. On today's episode of The internationalist podcast, we don't just want to discuss the weather patterns, but we're going to talk about how these extreme climate events are redrawing this map of risk, and it's impacting both stability within Pakistan, population flows, food security, but also regional cooperation and why this matters. And to do that, today, we're joined by Dr Erum Sattar. She's a legal scholar that specializes in water law amidst this global environmental and many institutional challenges. She's a lecturer and former program director of the sustainable water management program Tufts University in Boston, and she holds a doctorate in judicial sciences from Harvard Law School, and we're really excited to have Dr Erum on the podcast today. Welcome. 

Dr Erum Sattar  1:53  
Thank you for having me.

Dominic Bowen  1:55  
 Can you tell us about why the current flooding in Pakistan? It's not just an issue for Pakistanis, but it's something that really should be a wake up call for all of us. 

Dr Erum Sattar  2:03  
Thank you so much for that question and that focus. I absolutely, I think it's very important to think about these things in the broader context, Pakistan has been repeatedly hit in several years, and we have seen this repeated destruction. The problem is that this destruction is actually much more widespread this particular bout of monsoon weather that is hitting, in fact, across South Asia, Kashmir have also been hit. So there is, in fact, a lot that has been happening. The other problem is that if you connect it to a broader issue, where there was flooding earlier this year in Texas, and there were also flash floods, similar kind of mechanism where there are people close to where rivers are over flooding, there may not be early warning systems that are in place, and it's very, very difficult to have those in place, perhaps lack of investment, lack of funding, as well as you know, more broader public Education Pakistan is perennially resource stressed. But in the US, in the case of Texas, as we saw, there was an underfunding. And there were some estimates that perhaps only a million dollars that would have been spent in an early warning system would have tackled this particular problem much better. So a lot of times, even when richer countries have the resources these investments on sort of like water infrastructure or water governance or early warning systems, are just not prioritized, right? There's like all kinds of other things that are happening, so therefore these things just don't get done. Last year, if you remember this time in the US, in North Carolina, there were massive floods, and again, that was sort of like a hurricane, but instead of hitting the coast, it sort of hit inland more. So there's a lot of weather pattern disruption that is happening, and that weather pattern disruption is causing a huge amount of damage and harm that we are having to live with if we come to specifically now Pakistan, the National Disaster Management Authority says that we have at least 700 deaths. that community is left grappling with these impacts for years and years and years after. And I think that's what we're not factoring in properly. I think this is a global problem, and it's almost like we move on, oh, like last year in the US, it was like North Carolina, okay, well, gee, that happened. Those people are still dealing with what happened there. And then Texas happens. And then there are these floods in Pakistan, and, in fact, northern parts of India also that are extreme and having a lot of impact. So I think we really have to start thinking about our human impact on the environment, and then the environments impact back on humans. 

Dominic Bowen  4:56  
I'm glad you talked about some of the floods in the US. We had a great episode two or three years ago, actually, 2021 when there was the the catastrophic floods in in Germany and Austria. And I think in Germany, there was about 190 people that were killed. The same floods, the same early warning also reached Austria, and I think there was only a couple of fatalities. You know, it was a really interesting podcast for those that are interested in go back and have a listen to it, understanding how the German and this is obviously a highly developed country with really strong disaster preparedness, but because of the structures and because of the decentralized nature of governments in Germany, compared to how Austria has their disaster management set up, meant that some parts of Germany didn't respond in advance, even though the meteorologists were able to give the Early Warning, it didn't result. So it's not just a Oh, poor Pakistan. They're always suffering. They're underdeveloped. People die every year from floods. This happens in really developed countries as well. So I think it's important to remember, but we know in Pakistan that about a quarter of the country's GDP actually comes from agriculture, and about 40% of the country's workforce works in roles around agriculture, and most of that relies on irrigation from the Indus water system. As we were discussing. You know, the Indus Water Treaty was suspended by India in April of this year. So I wonder, with devastating floods in August, the suspension of the water treaty in April, what does this mean for stability and future development and population movements in places like Pakistan, when there's these just repeated challenges about not just livelihood, but also security and the ability to live and develop in an area. 

Dr Erum Sattar  6:32  
Can I take us back? But I mean really, really back, this is to the Indus Valley Civilization, which was a bronze era civilization primarily centered around Mohenjo Daro. What's fascinating about the Indus Valley civilization in particular are things like they had established drainage channels and they had sewerage management. So that kind of urban civilization to exist in the bronze era. It's one of the earliest phenomenal sort of things, and then it completely disappears. And there's very good research that is emerging as to like, what happened to this civilization. Our emerging understanding tells us that, in fact, what happened is that the Indus River changed course very slowly over time. So the Indus, where it used to flow in a certain way, where the civilization was built on that river basically went several 100 miles away. This is where people were, and this is where your civilization was, but the water was no longer there, so obviously now you can't live, right? And this whole civilization slowly collapses. One of the reasons that has, as we now understand, is the Indus, over millennia, has built up like this kind of a flood plain, which drains into the Arabian Sea. And what it is composed of is that there is an enormous amount of silt that comes off the Himalayas, primarily, and then deposits into and creates that delta. And water, as you know, will stop flowing when the level of the ground is higher. So the silt deposits over millennia, slowly, obviously, but then it becomes too high. So then that's why the river changes course. So the whole Delta fan, in a way, is made of silt deposit. And the reason this is important, this sort of old archeological history, what they believe is that what happened to these civilizations when they were now completely disrupted, were no longer able to live where they were, that they now had to migrate. Now this is another theme of civilization that we are now at migration from places where people cannot live, whether it's for environmental reasons or socio economic reasons, all kinds of other crises, people are on the move, and we know this, and there is a lot of growing hostility in places that would take these people in. And we know that there's a whole politics of the right that is rising, which says, Keep out these people. But if we go back to now the Indus Valley Civilization. What we think happened to these people is that, essentially, they moved to more hospitable places. That meant that there had to be, like, a way for them to now start living there, share land, share resources, etc. A lot of the evidence may actually indicate that they moved up to the Ganges basin, which is much further north, but now you layer on current political sovereign state borders onto that same land mass. And I mean, we do not at all think that other countries would be willing, easily, to take people who have to migrate because of environmental reasons. 

Dominic Bowen  9:40  
That's very, very interesting, well worth the read. I mean, the Indus Valley civilizations, we're talking about two and a half 1000 years before Christ. So that's about four and a half 1000 years from now. And they, from what I understand, had canals, they had wells. So not only could they prevent flooding of their villages, they could actually store water for the dry season, which is quite amazing, that these systems were in place then, and yet we still haven't perfectly worked it out today. When we look at today's problems, think a lot of the analysts are saying that some of the real impacts from the current flooding in Pakistan is going to be felt later in the year, once Pakistan transitions from the monsoon season to the dry season. I wonder, when we consider the ripple effects, not just on people and livelihoods and damage their property, but we've got energy production, food prices, you talked about migration, economic growth, and then you've got this, not just interstate movement, which is very, very difficult in the region. We've got Pakistan, India, China, we've got inter provincial governance issues. So what do you see as some of the ripple effects that we should be aware of, or at least considering over the coming months?

Dr Erum Sattar  10:39  
 I think let's pick up on what you were asking, which is, where does the livelihood primarily come from? If about 40% of the workforce is primarily employed in some kind of an agricultural income base, that's a massive reliance in much more developed countries, the reliance of a population that is earning something or eating something because of being reliant on agricultural income is obviously much, much, much less. I mean, in the one to 3% of the population Pakistan, like a very heavy pyramid, that's really agriculture heavy, and that has a huge problem, because of, where can you do this agriculture? That gets us back into When the British ruled India as one united country where they built the canal. Irrigation System was primarily actually in the lands of first the Punjab, and the Punjab became, this is the massive Punjab province that was then divided into both India and Pakistan at partition. But it became, in a way, the granary of the subcontinent. Food production was concentrated there, and it was done because of making a massive canal irrigation system. And the canal irrigation system, to this day, essentially structures the country in many ways. It flows north to south and then the downstream Province, which is Sindh, also wanted the benefits that come from canal irrigation right? Agricultural growth, land settlement, tax revenue. So everybody wanted some piece of this canal irrigation system. What China is to India, India is to Pakistan. It's always the upstream country that has first access to water. That is privileged, and I think that's the problem here. So you can take that across trans boundary, international boundaries, and within Pakistan, you can take it into like Punjab province, and then more the sin Province, which is at the base of the Arabian Sea. 

Dominic Bowen  12:30  
What does that mean? I mean, we see the same on the Nile, Egypt and Sudan's concerns about the grand Renaissance down that Ethiopia has built further upstream. What does it mean for Pakistan, who's downstream, over 90% of their annual renewable water sources come from the Indus River system. Now that India has suspended the Indus Water Treaty, does Pakistan have any recourse? Is there anything they can do to ensure that they continue to have access to water? 

Dr Erum Sattar  12:54  
So I think what Pakistan tried to do, and this goes back to partition in 1947 and then in 1948 when the standstill agreement is made between the two countries, is to go the legal route and to say, okay, what can we do? And one of the things that is in international water law, you know, not to really privilege Egypt here, but one of the things that countries rely on his historical uses, and what they say is that we have been the historical beneficiary and recipient of these waters, and that's kind of like what Pakistan's claim was at the time of these treaty negotiations, when they were happening, that said, Look, we have been using this water, you know, for a very long time, at least since the British started making this canal irrigation system. So we need to have these rights protected in law. Then this whole treaty negotiation process began in 1960 the Indus Waters Treaty is formally signed between Pakistan and India that basically delineated who would be doing what and at what time, and that held more or less for a very, very long time, until, as you're saying, India's unilateral suspension for which the treaty doesn't allow. The treaty doesn't at all say you can suspend it, or doesn't give any upstream power the power to suspend or the downstream power to unilaterally keep vetoing supposing proposed developments that India wants to do kind of thing. But the treaty is very, very detailed, and Pakistan tried to go down that route for a very long time now. What can Pakistan do? It can keep pressing its claim legally. It's in front of the International Court of Arbitration. It's in The Hague. It's lodged specific cases. These have also been going on for a very long time, and India has been fighting those and saying, You know what, they don't have jurisdiction. So India has been refusing to appear in front of those fora and that's a problem, because that completely breaks down bilateral communication between the two countries, and it doesn't allow some kind of legal intermediary. That's where we stand. But Pakistan, as far as I understand, keeps pressing its legal claims in front of these international forums, 

Dominic Bowen  15:02  
We know in Pakistan, this has been a long term statistic, the leading cause of child death and even childhood stunting in Pakistan comes from waterborne diseases. 80% of the diseases, things like hepatitis diarrhea, are caused by water pollution. Now I understand that most of the country, most of the population, has access to drinking water, but only about 36% of it is considered actually safe to drink. So when we look at things like suspension of the Indus Water Treaty, when we talk about flooding, we talk about continued risks from climate change, what are the future risks to Pakistan's domestic water shortage, water quality, access to safe water sources, and what does this mean for the health of the population, and ultimately, things like business, gross domestic product, the ability for the country to further develop and grow and improve the quality of life? 

Dr Erum Sattar  15:50  
Yeah, that's a really, really big, complex problem. And one of the things is having clean water delivered to taps, for instance, to drinking water quality, right? Is an really extensive undertaking, and it's really expensive undertaking, which requires a lot of very, very, very boring work, right? It requires plumbing. It requires plumbing that works throughout from the facility underground, leaking pipes and not having water wasted on route and then getting to customers. This is a problem that Pakistan definitely has. So you're right, malnutrition, childhood stunting are huge problems, but I'll tell you all kinds of things, like every time I travel in Pakistan, and especially when I go for conferences. And a couple of years ago, the Supreme Court of Pakistan had gotten very interested in working on water sector issues and had organized these big conferences, so I was one of the invited speakers, and every single person whom I interacted with who was not more privileged. So these are the people who are helping you get from one venue to the other, right, or helping you get to your hotel, or other things that you're doing around the city. Every single one of them had a different kind of story, which was very disturbing, of, how do you get water into your house? There were people, for instance, who had, you know, like, say, there were six apartments in a building. So all of the apartments together had water tanker, where you pay someone in a big water tanker from one city main to deliver you your water. And every week, or every two weeks, these people had to pull money to get that water tanker to their water tank that was probably on the top of their building, and then communally use it. And they were all going to pay the portion of that price. If you think about the quality of that water right? It is water in volume. So these are, again, they can get a water tanker, but imagine, on a daily basis, or on a weekly basis, having to figure out, how am I going to manage my utilities, water supply. There were many other administrative staff. Again, these are all sort of like lower cadres of like government employees, and they had other ways of accessing water, and not a single one of them said to me that we boil our water. And the reason they don't boil their water, which makes it obviously more unsafe to not boil, is because it takes energy, and it's some kind of an expense. You have to, like, boil it for a certain amount of time, right? It takes gas. Now, how are you going to pay for that? People primarily don't boil their water. They just drink what's available. And absolutely, that has a lot of pathogens that are mixed into it, and this is why public health is in the miserable state it's in. And from your experience and the people that you're working with, is the impact of this felt equally across society. In Pakistan, I guess geographically across Punjab, Khyber, pakhtuno, Sindh province. Is it felt the same across the country, but also across genders, and men and women feeling the same risks? Or is it felt differently by different communities? I think there are two things just on the geographic scale, which is that Punjab probably has a lot more access to groundwater where it is called Sweet, so you can drink it, whereas in a lot of parts of sin, the water is thought of as salty. And again, this goes back to that Indus Delta. It's basically low lying and silt deposits, and therefore there's not a lot of groundwater that is sweet that you can access. So anywhere where there is less access to fresh usable water, their situation is much worse in terms of what can they access, right? They just don't have access to decent quality well water, in which case now you're really reliant on getting it from somewhere else, or at least in urban areas, large cities such as say Karachi, basically, the water supply is delivered by water tankers. And water tankers are, again, you have to pay for put into your tanks, and that also takes a lot of energy to pump it up so that you can then use it in your house. 

Dominic Bowen  19:52  
Zooming out to the strategic or the macro level. I'll be really keen to hear from you from a legal and a precedent perspective, the suspension. You mention the Indus water treaty and how India and Pakistan are currently negotiating resolution of this at the same time as Pakistan is just woefully unprepared for the water and other natural disasters it's facing. What does this tell us for other trans boundary river agreements that we're seeing in Asia? We see between Palestine and Israel, we see several across African countries. What does this tell us about the power of upstream countries and their ability to assert more rights over water? 

Dr Erum Sattar  20:27  
So I think two things. One that I think we should focus on in a macro level, is that there is a massive, in fact, drying going on, which means that both in India and Pakistan, at least for Pakistan and I will say this specifically, about half of irrigation water, which is a huge volume, is groundwater, which means that it is not surface water flows that are providing what the country needs to produce its food and other crops. Now, groundwater has no treaty, so it's only the surface water flows between the two countries that have a treaty. But there is a large scale groundwater over abstraction crisis, there's also a pollution crisis, because there's a lot of arsenic and salts that are mixing with the groundwater that has to be pumped deeper and at greater cost. Therefore, the groundwater crisis around South Asia is only going to become worse, which is going to make food production more costly, and it'll have to be somehow efficiencies will have to be found now going to the surface water crisis. So supposing India is now saying we are suspending unilaterally the Indus Waters Treaty. What does that mean? The first thing it starts to do is to basically stop any kind of information sharing, which means India doesn't have to tell Pakistan anything about say this flooding upstream, these waters may be released to you, plus India can then stop telling Pakistan about construction projects that it's doing on the so called Three western rivers that India was authorized to do by the Treaty. So therefore, both of these things India can stop doing right. Doesn't have to tell Pakistan about projects it's constructing. Doesn't have to say what kind of emergency flood waters may be heading Pakistan's way. Both of these are problematic. Couple this with the groundwater crisis that is not a part of the Indus Waters Treaty at all, but it's a real crisis that these countries are going to face, are already facing, and it's only going to get worse. And then we get into the macro, bigger question that we were asking, if there is a drying which is worse in drought periods, then what happens to overall habitability on the lands that people now currently occupy and grow food from. 

Dominic Bowen  22:32  
So when you look to the future of water sustainability, water access, both at a local level, but also Pakistan and India from the Indus station, how confident do you feel about the future? 

Dr Erum Sattar  22:42  
So I actually, I'm, I'm usually a very glass half full kind of person, but in this case, I have huge concerns. And my huge concerns are that I do not think that these countries are, especially as far as the Indus Waters Treaty goes, are being mature with each other, they are not really talking about. Look, these are problems that all of us face and are going to face more and more and more, and that approach is nowhere on the horizon. So supposing, by some magical waving of the wand, we can get the Indus Waters Treaty to be functional again as it was. It doesn't mean that it didn't have problems. It had problems in its functioning kind of thing. And right now, there's no magical solution to India coming back to the table and saying, You know what, we cooperate just on the bare minimums of the Indus Waters Treaty, much less forget all of the other environmental crisis that's heading our way, population growth, climate change, greater food production demand, greater energy demand. Even if we leave all of that aside, we just work on the Indus Waters Treaty. These countries now, politically, it is so toxic. I mean, if you saw the Independence Day of both countries on the 14th and the 15th of August, and Prime Minister Modi gave this big speech in Delhi on the Independence Day ceremony, the tone that he had towards Pakistan, especially the Indus Waters Treaty, etc, these were not signs that these two countries were going to become politically mature and start talking to each other and saying, let's have water cooperation. So as far as the Indus Waters Treaty is concerned, Pakistan obviously will keep pressing its claims. But then what right? If India doesn't, then what kind of thing, and regardless of the Indus Waters Treaty, if half of water used in Pakistan is groundwater, then the groundwater is governed badly also, and is getting over abstracted. There is urban water crisis. No doubts about this right now because of the massive amounts of flooding that's happened. I mean, Karachi is basically underwater. You know, they're draining water. The city government is working very hard, but again, resources are limited. The damage is accumulating, and people get really affected. If your first floor of your shop, or your entire shop gets ruined, it's kind of like what happened again in North Carolina, if your whole building is under water, you are left dealing with that problem for a very, very long time. How do you recover your losses? How do you rebuild so the urban water crisis is there? The groundwater issue is not managed well at all. It is over abstracted. And I don't think we should look at this just in India and Pakistan. There's a new, very important paper out that's talking about two things. One is saying, look, there is complete over abstraction that is happening in groundwater basins around the world. This is from California to anywhere where the agricultural powerhouses rely on groundwater extraction, and that dries out our underground aquifers at a rate that they cannot recharge at. And then there is polar ice cap melting, the Himalayas and the Karakoram Hindu Kush range is like third pole, right? That's what it's always called. There is massive glacial melting. And it could be that glaciers could have or get reduced by up to 80% these are really serious scenarios by the end of the century, which is not that far, in human terms, all of that surface water flow of the Indus gets threatened if the glacial melt essentially disappears, flooding in the shorter term, complete ending of this supply in the longer run, which leads to sea level rise eventually also right, because the glaciers are melting and going to the seas, which threatens coastal cities. And that's how people don't think water is very, very local, without any doubt, when I'm drinking a glass of water, it's super local. This issue for me, but you can just keep expanding out, expanding out, expanding out, and expanding the complexity and looking at the global scale. That scares me, because all of these coastal cities across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, are susceptible to the threats of real sea level rise. And then what do we do? Where do people migrate to when that land is no longer something that people can live on? 

Dominic Bowen  26:52  
And when you look around the world, around there's a lot of international risks that we're exposed to. What are the risks that concern you the most? 

Dr Erum Sattar  27:00  
Absolutely, there's so many risks. But to me, the biggest risk, in many ways, is to not have honest to goodness, like a sympathetic, empathetic attitude. Because I think we are not somehow able as a species, to sort of sit back and say, You know what? These environmental risks, these water related risks, these habitability risks, are coming for us all. If they don't hit us today, it doesn't mean that they won't hit our kids or our grandkids or their kids, right? Human beings will hopefully keep going on. So I think we discount a lot of risks if they're not directly hitting us today, and then we discount risks that may not hit us for a very long time, which means it's not my problem. I don't have to deal with it. Okay, if somebody else's grandkids at some point have to deal with it, what do I care? I think a lot of countries also think that because we are richer and we have a lot more resources, we'll be fine, and we'll be fine. We'll be you know, I'll be okay. It is somebody else's problem, so there's this risk of not having empathy to me and having a sense of look, we really have to care in other ways that may even be beyond my here and now is a huge risk, and we're missing a lot of these environmental risks, I think as a result.

Dominic Bowen  28:15  
 Thanks for mentioning that. I thought that was a really powerful note. The lack of empathy being a really important one. We know there's so many cascading risks from climate volatility, institutional fragility, geopolitical tension. So it's really easy to focus at the macro level, and sometimes to focus on systems and structures, but I think your mind is really critical that empathy and really bringing not just treaties and frameworks, but the human dimension to that is really, really important. So thank you for that, and thank you for coming on the international risk podcast today. 

Dr Erum Sattar  28:41  
Thank you very much for having me. 

Dominic Bowen  28:43  
Well, that was a really great conversation with Dr Aram Satar. She's a water lawyer expert, and I really appreciated hearing her insights on the suspension of the Indus Water Treaty, as well as the implications for communities in Pakistan and implications on agriculture, food security and economic development. Please remember to subscribe to our email list that you can find on our website to get our latest news, podcasts and information in your inbox every two weeks. Today's podcast was produced and coordinated by Anna Kummelstedt. I'm Dominic Bowen, your host. 

Dr Erum Sattar  29:12  
Thanks very much for listening. We'll speak again next week. Thank you for listening to this episode of The International risk podcast. For more episodes and articles, visit the International risk podcast.com follow us on LinkedIn, blue sky and Instagram for the latest updates and to ask your questions to our host, Dominic Bowen, see you next time you.