The future of sustainable hydropower development in the Indus basin
Authors:   , Dhaubanjar Sanita 
Published: April 2024

Though hydropower development in the Indus is primarily linked to achieving energy security under Sustainable Development Goal or SDG 7(energy), it also affects SDG 2(food), 6(water), 9(resilient infrastructures), 10(social equity), 13(climate action) and15 (biodiversity). Considering these linkages between hydropower and the SDGs, this thesis explores the potential for sustainable hydropower development in the Indus basin under climate and socio-economic changes. Existing hydropower assessment frameworks perpetuate short-sighted, political and technocratic biases. These emphasize theoretical, technical or financial performance and neglect sustainability and equitability at the local scale. Integrating approaches from global to local studies with local insights, I systematically identify theoretical, technical, financial, and a new class of sustainable hydropower potential for run-of-river (RoR) hydropower development in the hydropower-rich upper Indus basin (UIB) in the north. Under historical climate, I explore how national policies and preferences for scale and sustainability affect the hydropower potential. The historical theoretical potential of the UIB is 1564 TWh/yr. Across six policy scenarios, the technical (300 TWh/yr: 12-19% of theoretical), financial (266 TWh/yr: 6-17%) and sustainable (90 TWh/yr: 2-10%) potential are a small portion of the theoretical value. Under future climate projections, the theoretical potential increases by 3.9--56% from the historical value while technical potential changes between -2.3--46.8%, financial potential between -8.8–50.4% and sustainable potential between -6.1–49.7%. Hydropower development opportunities are best utilized under policies that mix small and large projects of multiple configurations, especially for maximizing sustainable potential, both now and in the future. The stark differences between the technical and sustainable potential show the trade off between balancing hydropower development to only achieve SDG 7 versus also considering other SDGs. Additionally, hydropower potential and its affordability differs across the UIB subbasins UIB highlighting the socio-political challenges of equitably achieving energy security throughout the Indus. Hence, it is promising that there will be more hydropower in the future, especially in the southeast where larger, cheaper and more sustainable plants can be built. However, future energy demand increases in the opposite direction worsening the spatial disparity in hydropower availability across the basin. Sustainable hydropower in the UIB will still remain enough to meet the demand here. But to achieve energy security in the whole Indus, plants will have to be built in unsustainable areas. While there is not doubt that we must consider climate change to find fair and sustainable ways to expand hydropower in the Indus, this thesis highlights that considering local policies and preferences for development scale and sustainability measures have a stronger implication than climate change. The basin-scale analysis indicates that current practices in the UIB propel hydropower development that can harm the environment, increase water conflicts, worsens geo-hazard risks, increase climate vulnerability and hinder energy justice. Hence, policy interventions are imperative to ensure sustainable and equitable development of hydropower as it becomes more abundant and cheaper, but spatially more uneven in the future. Globally, the definition of sustainable hydropower potential should be expanded to incorporate socio-political challenges in developing the hydropower potential to meet evolving energy demands equitably.