Pakistan, April 27 -- 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 I...