In 1995, World Bank Vice President Ismail Serageldin warned that whereas the conflicts of the previous 100 years had been over oil, “the wars of the next century will be fought over water.”

Thirty years on, that prediction is being tested in one of the world’s most volatile regions: Kashmir.

On April 24, 2025, the government of India announced that it would downgrade diplomatic ties with its neighbor Pakistan over an attack by militants in Kashmir that killed 26 tourists. As part of that cooling of relations, India said it would immediately suspend the Indus Waters Treaty – a decades-old agreement that allowed both countries to share water use from the rivers that flow from India into Pakistan. Pakistan has promised reciprocal moves and warned that any disruption to its water supply would be considered “an act of war.”

The current flareup escalated quickly, but has a long history. At the Indus Basin Water Project at the Ohio State University, we are engaged in a multiyear project investigating the transboundary water dispute between Pakistan and India.

I am currently in Pakistan conducting fieldwork in Kashmir and across the Indus Basin. Geopolitical tensions in the region, which have been worsened by the recent attack in Pahalgam, Indian-administered Kashmir, do pose a major threat to the water treaty. So too does another factor that is helping escalate the tensions: climate change.