B2 · Upper Intermediate
14 min
climategeopoliticswater securitysouth asia
The Third Pole: Glaciers, War, and the Water That's Disappearing
El Tercer Polo: Glaciares, Guerra y el Agua que Desaparece
This week, Pakistan struck targets in Afghanistan, including a university. Fletcher and Octavio use the story as a door into the climate crisis of the Hindu Kush, the glaciers that feed a billion people, and the growing danger of water as a driver of conflict.
Esta semana, Pakistán lanzó ataques contra Afganistán, incluyendo una universidad. Fletcher y Octavio usan esta noticia como puerta de entrada para explorar la crisis climática del Hindu Kush, los glaciares que alimentan a mil millones de personas y el peligro del agua como causa de conflicto.
8 essential B2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| glaciar | glacier | El glaciar ha perdido la mitad de su volumen en los últimos cincuenta años. |
| deshielo | thaw / glacial melt | El deshielo acelerado está causando inundaciones en toda la región. |
| estrés hídrico | water stress | Pakistán es uno de los países con mayor estrés hídrico del mundo. |
| cuenca fluvial | river basin | Millones de personas dependen de la cuenca fluvial del Indo para su agricultura. |
| multiplicador de amenazas | threat multiplier | El cambio climático funciona como un multiplicador de amenazas en regiones ya inestables. |
| mitigación | mitigation | La mitigación del cambio climático requiere una reducción rápida de las emisiones globales. |
| adaptación | adaptation (climate) | Las comunidades rurales están buscando soluciones de adaptación frente a la escasez de agua. |
| hidrodiplomacia | hydrodiplomacy | La hidrodiplomacia es cada vez más importante en regiones donde el agua es escasa. |
Pakistan bombed a university this week.
Seven people killed, eighty-five injured, including students, inside Afghan territory.
And I keep thinking: most of the coverage treats this as a border conflict story.
But there's something underneath it that nobody's really naming.
Es verdad.
That's true.
Los ataques son la superficie del problema, no el problema en sí.
The strikes are the surface of the problem, not the problem itself.
Entre Pakistán y Afganistán hay una relación muy complicada, con fronteras que los dos países disputan desde hace décadas.
Between Pakistan and Afghanistan there's a very complicated relationship, with borders both countries have disputed for decades.
Pero si miras más profundo, encuentras algo que me parece más urgente todavía: el agua.
But if you look deeper, you find something that seems even more urgent to me: water.
Right, and that's the thread I want to pull today.
Because these two countries share river systems that are fed by some of the most important glaciers on the planet, and those glaciers are in serious trouble.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
La región del Hindu Kush y el Himalaya, que incluye también el Karakórum y el Tíbet, tiene más hielo que cualquier otra zona del mundo fuera de los polos.
The Hindu Kush-Himalayan region, which also includes the Karakoram and Tibet, holds more ice than anywhere else on Earth outside the poles.
Por eso los científicos la llaman "el tercer polo".
That's why scientists call it 'the third pole.' And that ice is disappearing far faster than anyone anticipated.
Y ese hielo está desapareciendo mucho más rápido de lo que esperábamos.
Give me a sense of the scale here.
We're talking about how many glaciers, roughly?
Más de cincuenta mil glaciares en esa región.
More than fifty thousand glaciers in that region.
Y los ríos que vienen de ahí, el Indo, el Ganges, el Brahmaputra, el Kabul, proporcionan agua dulce a más de mil quinientos millones de personas.
And the rivers that flow from them, the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Kabul, provide fresh water to more than one and a half billion people.
No es una exageración decir que esta región es la torre de agua de Asia.
It's not an exaggeration to call this region the water tower of Asia.
The Kabul River runs right through Afghanistan and empties into Pakistan's Indus system.
So when we talk about Pakistani and Afghan farmers, Pakistani cities, Afghan agriculture, they're all drawing from the same upstream source.
The same melting ice.
Y ahí está el problema más grave.
And that's where the most serious problem lies.
Cuando los glaciares se derriten, al principio hay más agua.
When glaciers melt, at first there's more water.
Los ríos crecen, hay inundaciones, como las que devastaron Pakistán en 2022.
Rivers swell, there are floods, like those that devastated Pakistan in 2022.
Pero después viene la parte que la gente no entiende bien: cuando el hielo se acaba, el río se seca.
But then comes the part people don't fully grasp: when the ice runs out, the river dries up.
Ese proceso ya está ocurriendo en algunas partes de la región.
That process is already happening in parts of the region.
I was in Islamabad in 2010 covering the floods that killed nearly two thousand people.
I remember standing in fields that had been underwater for weeks, talking to farmers who had lost everything.
And the bitter irony was that the same glacial melt that caused the flooding was also going to leave them with less water in twenty years.
Es una trampa perfectamente cruel: demasiada agua ahora, y muy poca después.
It's a perfectly cruel trap: too much water now, and far too little later.
Y para Pakistán esto es una crisis existencial, porque el país ya tiene una de las tasas más altas de estrés hídrico del mundo.
And for Pakistan this is an existential crisis, because the country already has one of the highest rates of water stress in the world.
Más de doscientos millones de personas dependen de un sistema que está bajo una presión enorme.
More than two hundred million people depend on a system under enormous pressure.
And Afghanistan is even more exposed, right?
Because it has almost no infrastructure to manage any of this.
Mucho más vulnerable.
Far more vulnerable.
Afganistán es uno de los países más pobres del mundo y tiene décadas de guerra que han destruido lo poco que tenía.
Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, with decades of war having destroyed what little it had.
No hay presas suficientes, no hay canales de riego modernos, no hay sistemas de predicción de inundaciones.
There are not enough dams, no modern irrigation canals, no flood forecasting systems.
Cuando el río Kabul crece, simplemente destruye.
When the Kabul River swells, it simply destroys.
There's a historical layer here worth naming.
The border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Durand Line, was drawn by a British civil servant in 1893.
It cuts through Pashtun communities, ignores river basins, ignores everything that matters for how actual people live and farm and move.
Y Afganistán nunca ha reconocido esa frontera oficialmente.
And Afghanistan has never officially recognized that border.
Eso significa que cualquier disputa sobre el agua, cualquier negociación sobre los ríos compartidos, tiene que ocurrir entre dos países que técnicamente no están de acuerdo ni sobre dónde termina uno y empieza el otro.
Which means any dispute over water, any negotiation about shared rivers, has to happen between two countries that technically don't even agree on where one ends and the other begins.
Es una situación absurda.
It's an absurd situation.
And into that absurdity you drop a climate emergency.
Shrinking glaciers, unpredictable flooding seasons, drought cycles getting longer and more severe.
The pressures multiply on top of each other.
Hay un informe del Centro Internacional para el Desarrollo Integrado de la Montaña, que es la organización científica más importante que estudia el Hindu Kush, que dice que incluso si el mundo cumple con los objetivos del Acuerdo de París, esta región perdería entre el treinta y el cincuenta por ciento de su volumen glaciar para el año 2100.
There's a report from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, the most important scientific organization studying the Hindu Kush, which says that even if the world meets the Paris Agreement targets, this region would lose between thirty and fifty percent of its glacial volume by 2100.
Si no los cumplimos, podría ser el setenta y cinco por ciento.
If we don't meet them, it could be seventy-five percent.
Seventy-five percent.
That's not a gradual adjustment.
That's the collapse of the water supply for a significant fraction of humanity.
Y lo que complica todo esto es que los países que más van a sufrir, Pakistán, Afganistán, Nepal, Bután, son los que menos han contribuido al cambio climático.
And what complicates everything is that the countries that will suffer most, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, are the ones that have contributed least to climate change.
Pakistán produce menos del uno por ciento de las emisiones globales de dióxido de carbono.
Pakistan produces less than one percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.
Es una injusticia climática enorme.
It's an enormous climate injustice.
That point lands hard.
A country that barely registers on the emissions charts is losing its glaciers because of choices made in Beijing, Washington, Brussels, and a hundred other capitals far away.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y mientras tanto, la tensión política entre Pakistán y Afganistán crece.
And meanwhile, the political tension between Pakistan and Afghanistan grows.
Los talibanes, que gobiernan Afganistán desde 2021, quieren construir más presas en el río Kabul para desarrollar la agricultura afgana.
The Taliban, who have governed Afghanistan since 2021, want to build more dams on the Kabul River to develop Afghan agriculture.
Pakistán ve eso como una amenaza directa a su suministro de agua.
Pakistan sees that as a direct threat to its water supply.
That dynamic isn't unique to this region.
You see it on the Nile, you see it on the Mekong, you see it on the Jordan.
Upstream countries want to develop their water resources;
downstream countries feel existentially threatened.
It's one of the oldest sources of conflict in human history.
Hay un concepto que los expertos llaman "hidrodiplomacia", que es básicamente la negociación internacional sobre el agua.
There's a concept experts call 'hydrodiplomacy,' which is basically international negotiation over water.
Y los tratados de agua pueden ser increíblemente duraderos.
And water treaties can be incredibly durable.
El Tratado del Indo entre India y Pakistán, firmado en 1960 con ayuda del Banco Mundial, sobrevivió tres guerras entre los dos países.
The Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan, signed in 1960 with the help of the World Bank, survived three wars between the two countries.
Eso es notable.
That's remarkable.
Though India has been making noise about withdrawing from that treaty recently, right?
Partly as pressure after the Kashmir attacks.
Sí, y eso es muy preocupante.
Yes, and that's very alarming.
Si ese tratado colapsa, Pakistán perdería acceso garantizado a ríos que alimentan a la mitad de su agricultura.
If that treaty collapses, Pakistan would lose guaranteed access to rivers that feed half of its agriculture.
Junto con el deshielo glaciar, sería un desastre sin precedentes.
Combined with glacial melt, it would be an unprecedented disaster.
India y Pakistán tienen armas nucleares, Fletcher.
India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons, Fletcher.
El agua puede ser más peligrosa que las bombas.
Water can be more dangerous than bombs.
I want to go back to Afghanistan for a moment, because the Taliban dimension here is something people overlook.
The Taliban have actually been talking about infrastructure in ways that would have been unimaginable from their first period in power, in the nineties.
They want dams, they want irrigation.
And climate pressure is part of why.
Es irónico, pero sí.
It's ironic, but yes.
El cambio climático obliga a cualquier gobierno, incluso a uno tan ideológico como el de los talibanes, a pensar en la supervivencia básica de su población.
Climate change forces any government, even one as ideological as the Taliban, to think about the basic survival of its population.
Afganistán ya sufre sequías muy graves, y los agricultores, que son la mayoría de la gente, necesitan agua.
Afghanistan already suffers very serious droughts, and farmers, who are the majority of the population, need water.
La ideología no elimina el hambre.
Ideology doesn't eliminate hunger.
There's research connecting Afghan migration patterns directly to drought cycles.
When the rains fail and the rivers drop, people move.
Some go to the cities.
Some go to Pakistan.
Some join armed groups because that's where food is.
Climate as a recruitment engine.
Los militares lo saben muy bien.
The military knows this well.
El Pentágono lleva años describiendo el cambio climático como un "multiplicador de amenazas".
The Pentagon has been describing climate change as a 'threat multiplier' for years.
No es que el clima cause las guerras directamente, sino que amplifica las tensiones que ya existen: pobreza, disputas territoriales, desigualdad.
It's not that climate directly causes wars, but it amplifies the tensions that already exist: poverty, territorial disputes, inequality.
Es como echar gasolina a un fuego que ya estaba ardiendo.
It's like pouring fuel on a fire that was already burning.
And the region we're talking about is already burning, figuratively and literally.
Pakistan hit record temperatures of fifty-three degrees Celsius in Sindh in recent years.
The combination of extreme heat and reduced water availability is not a future scenario.
It's happening.
Y tiene consecuencias directas para la salud pública.
And it has direct consequences for public health.
Cuando el agua escasea, la gente bebe agua contaminada.
When water is scarce, people drink contaminated water.
Las enfermedades diarreicas matan a cientos de miles de niños en esta región cada año.
Diarrheal diseases kill hundreds of thousands of children in this region every year.
El estrés hídrico no es solo un problema agrícola;
Water stress isn't just an agricultural problem;
es un problema de supervivencia humana básica.
it's a basic human survival problem.
What's the international community actually doing about this, beyond the research and the reports?
Because I've read the reports for years and the glaciers keep shrinking.
Poco, y eso es lo frustrante.
Not much, and that's what's frustrating.
Hay proyectos de adaptación, pequeñas presas artificiales, lo que en el Himalaya llaman "glaciares artificiales" o "estupas de hielo", que son estructuras que atrapan el agua de invierno en forma de hielo para liberarla lentamente en primavera.
There are adaptation projects, small artificial reservoirs, what they call 'artificial glaciers' or 'ice stupas' in the Himalayas, which are structures that trap winter water as ice to release it slowly in spring.
Son soluciones ingeniosas pero locales, muy pequeñas comparadas con el problema.
They're ingenious solutions but local ones, tiny compared to the scale of the problem.
Ice stupas.
I've read about those.
A Ladakhi engineer named Sonam Wangchuk developed the concept.
They look like giant cones of ice standing in the middle of the landscape.
Genuinely beautiful, actually, and genuinely effective at the village scale.
Pero no puedes resolver con estupas de hielo un problema que requiere reducir emisiones globales en décadas.
But you can't solve with ice stupas a problem that requires reducing global emissions over decades.
La adaptación es necesaria, pero sin mitigación real del cambio climático, es simplemente retrasar lo inevitable.
Adaptation is necessary, but without real climate mitigation, it's simply delaying the inevitable.
Y la mitigación requiere que los países ricos cumplan sus promesas, lo cual, hasta ahora, no ha ocurrido.
And mitigation requires rich countries to fulfill their promises, which, so far, has not happened.
The tragedy of commons, global edition.
Everyone benefits from the atmosphere as a carbon dump, no one wants to bear the cost of cleaning it up, and the people who bear the consequences the hardest are the ones who put the least in.
Dicho perfectamente.
Said perfectly.
Y volviendo a lo que empezó esta conversación: cuando Pakistán ataca Afganistán, cuando hay tensión en esa frontera, cuando los refugiados cruzan, cuando los talibanes construyen presas que Islamabad no quiere, parte de lo que está debajo de todo eso es la presión sobre los recursos.
And coming back to what started this conversation: when Pakistan strikes Afghanistan, when there's tension on that border, when refugees cross, when the Taliban build dams that Islamabad doesn't want, part of what lies beneath all of that is pressure on resources.
El agua que se va.
The water that's leaving.
El hielo que desaparece.
The ice that's disappearing.
Which is why bombing a university in Afganistán and the fate of fifty thousand glaciers are part of the same story.
That's the connection most coverage misses entirely.
Oye, antes de terminar, me llamó la atención algo que dijiste hace un rato.
Hey, before we finish, something you said a while ago caught my attention.
Usaste la palabra "inevitable" y yo usé "inevitable" también, pero en español la pronunciación es diferente.
You used the word 'inevitable' and I used 'inevitable' too, but in Spanish the stress falls differently.
Mucha gente que aprende español pone el acento en el lugar equivocado.
A lot of people learning Spanish put the stress in the wrong place.
Oh, I definitely would have gotten that wrong.
How does it work in Spanish?
En español las palabras que terminan en vocal, en "n" o en "s" normalmente tienen el acento en la penúltima sílaba.
In Spanish, words ending in a vowel, in 'n,' or in 's' normally stress the second-to-last syllable.
"Inevitable" termina en "e", así que el acento cae en "ta": i-ne-vi-TA-ble.
'Inevitable' ends in 'e,' so the stress falls on 'ta': i-ne-vi-TA-ble.
Y hay muchas palabras parecidas: "probable", "posible", "imposible".
And there are many similar words: 'probable,' 'posible,' 'imposible.' They all follow the same rule.
Todas siguen la misma regla.
So it's a pattern, not a memorization exercise.
Once you know the default rule, most of the language follows it.
That's actually reassuring.
My Spanish teacher in Austin calls these words "false friends in disguise," because they look the same but sound completely different.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y cuando no se sigue la regla, el español usa una tilde, un acento escrito, para avisarte.
And when the rule isn't followed, Spanish uses a written accent mark to warn you.
"Fácil", "árbol", "glaciár"...
'Fácil,' 'árbol,' 'glaciár'...
no, espera, "glaciar" sí sigue la regla.
no wait, 'glaciar' does follow the rule.
Lo que pasa es que el español es más predecible de lo que parece, si entiendes el sistema.
The point is that Spanish is more predictable than it seems, if you understand the system.
More predictable than it seems.
I'm going to hold onto that.
That's a better headline for the language than what I've been telling myself for the last three years.
Thanks for that, and thanks for walking us through something genuinely sobering today.
De nada.
You're welcome.
Y la próxima vez que pongas hielo en tu vaso de agua, piensa en los glaciares del Hindu Kush.
And the next time you put ice in your glass of water, think about the glaciers of the Hindu Kush.
Aunque sé que lo que realmente pones es hielo en el vino, que es otro tema completamente.
Although I know what you actually put ice in is wine, which is an entirely separate issue.