Land and water use

Two remote-sensing datasets were used to estimate land and water use in the Kabul, Kurram and Gomal transboundary basins shared between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The proportion of different land-cover classes within these three basins was estimated. Barren land and rangeland form the largest block of land-cover classes owing to the prevailing semi-arid conditions. Domestic water use ranges from 21.2 million m3 (mcm) in Gomal to 554 mcm in Kabul and 106 mcm in the Kurram. Due to the lack of data, industrial water use was assumed to be one quarter of domestic water use. According to the cropland area estimated using the Regional Land Cover Monitoring System (RCLMS) and evapotranspiration data, agricultural water use is 7350 mcm, 1890 mcm and 716 mcm in the Kabul, Kurram and Gomal basins, respectively. Improving transboundary co-operation can help optimize land and water use in the basins. Given the difficult context in which water co-operation would start from zero, ‘low-hanging fruit’ for advancing co-operation may lie in: (i) focusing effort on the Kurram and Gomal where, given land- and water use patterns, efforts towards co-operation may be less contentious; and (ii) focusing on data collection and assessment to establish an evidence-based foundation on which co-operation can build.