The Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), now held in abeyance by India, was hammered out in 1960 and hailed as a triumph of diplomacy. Against the backdrop of Cold War rivalries, global powers leaned in to push through an agreement that would ostensibly keep two nuclear-armed neighbours from clashing. Yet as political leaders congratulated themselves, they overlooked a deeper, more insidious tragedy: the slow unravelling of the Indus Basin’s ecology. By chopping up the river system into national quotas, the treaty sidelined nature’s own logic. Rivers that had once flowed freely from the glaciers of the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea were broken apart, their seasonal rhythms disrupted, their ecological connections severed. The Indus Basin-an intricate network of rivers, floodplains, deserts, and a sprawling delta-was gradually set up for collapse. The rot set in at the very top, with the Himalayas. Fed by glacial melt and monsoon rains, the Indus and its tributaries-Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej-had for millennia carried life down the mountains. These rivers didn’t just bring water; they carted along sediment that built up fertile floodplains and nourished the delta. But with the treaty carving out rivers as national assets, each side rushed to dam, divert, and siphon off as much water as possible. Gigantic reservoirs like India’s Bhakra Dam and Pakistan’s Tarbela Dam mushroomed, trapping sediment that was meant to replenish the plains downstream. In effect, the rivers were throttled at their source, and the damage rippled outward. Floodplains, once the heart and soul of the basin’s ecology, bore the next brunt. Before the treaty, these vast, low-lying lands would soak up seasonal floods, spread out sediments, and recharge aquifers. They teemed with fisheries, supported grazing lands, and nurtured rich biodiversity. But under the new regime of water control, the flood pulse was choked off. Rivers stayed locked within their channels, even during monsoon highs. Floodplains dried out or were ploughed over for intensive agriculture reliant on chemical inputs and tubewell irrigation. Rural communities that had adapted to live with floods were pushed aside, left to fend for themselves as the ecological balance tipped over. An ecological annexure to the IWT is long overdue, embedding climate resilience, biodiversity conservation, and groundwater protection into the heart of water diplomacy. The Hakra River tells this story in miniature. A major floodway of the Sutlej, the 1100 kms long Hakra once fanned out across Rajasthan, Cholistan, and Tharparkar, carrying monsoon overflows into the Rann of Kutch. It helped top up aquifers across arid regions, making life possible in some of South Asia’s harshest deserts. But the treaty left the Hakra out in the cold. As upstream diversions kicked in, the river dried up, and with it went the delicate balance of life it sustained. Today, the Cholistan desert’s groundwater has dropped so low that even mechanical borewells can’t dig down far enough. Communities have packed up and moved out, abandoning lands their ancestors had tilled for centuries. Downstream, the collapse only deepened. The Indus Delta, once one of the largest and most vibrant in the world, has withered. In its prime, the delta received around 25 million acre-feet of freshwater and 400 million tons of sediment each year, supporting vast mangrove forests, freshwater wetlands, and some of Pakistan’s richest fisheries. But as dams and diversions cut off upstream flows, the delta began to dry out. Today, it gets less than 5 million acre-feet of water and a fraction of the sediment it once received. Over 90 percent of wetlands have dried up. Sea water has pushed inland by more than 80 kilometers, ruining fields, displacing villages, and wiping out livelihoods. In Gujarat and Rajasthan, the story is no brighter. Efforts to rope in the Sutlej waters through projects like the Indira Gandhi Canal have largely fallen flat. Despite grand promises of turning deserts into green belts, only a sliver of land has been irrigated effectively. Most of the water is lost to evaporation and seepage, while fragile desert ecosystems have been thrown off balance. Looking back, it’s clear that geopolitics treated rivers as bargaining chips to be split up and fought over, rather than as living systems to be cared for. The treaty locked both countries into a zero-sum mindset: whatever one side held onto, the other must lose. Instead of working together to shore up the basin’s health, both nations doubled down on extraction-digging deeper, building higher, and pushing nature further to the brink. What’s worse, the ecological fallout hasn’t stayed put. As groundwater levels sink, arsenic contamination has crept in. Punjab’s water table drops by about a meter every year. Salinity is spreading across farmlands. Communities are getting pushed out of their homes not by bombs or bullets, but by poisoned wells and barren fields. If there’s any hope of turning this around, it lies in ditching the old mentality. The Indus Basin must be seen for what it truly is: a single, interconnected ecosystem that stretches from the Himalayan glaciers through riverine plains, deserts, and deltas, to the Arabian Sea. Managing it calls for countries to sit down together and hammer out a new framework-one that doesn’t carve up rivers but stitches ecosystems back together. Environmental flows must be restored-not as charity, but as necessity. Managed floods need to be let loose to recharge floodplains and wetlands. The Hakra corridor must be revived, not paved over or abandoned. Sediment flows must be kept up to rebuild the delta’s crumbling defences against the sea. Above all, the future must be rooted in stewardship, not control. An ecological annexure to the IWT is long overdue, embedding climate resilience, biodiversity conservation, and groundwater protection into the heart of water diplomacy. Without it, both countries risk watching the very rivers they fought so hard to control dry up and blow away. The time has come to move past the geopolitical chess game-and start patching up the living tapestry that once made the Indus Basin one of the richest landscapes on Earth. The writer is an Islamabad-based veteran journalist and an independent researcher. He can be reached on Twitter @riazmissen