Figure - available from: Water Resources Research
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Pakistan’s Indus Basin Irrigation System (IBIS). Showing primary and secondary channels; tertiary channel data is not widely available. Light brown circles throughout inset map show urban areas co‐located within dark green, irrigated space.
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The most significant investment in improved water governance for Pakistan in recent decades—irrigation management transfer under the PIDA Act of 1997—ended with repeal in 2019 in the province of Punjab. Before embarking on the next major experiment, we wish to examine what the opportunity space for improvement in Pakistan’s water governance is. We...
Citations
... but new developments may consider distributed systems that require lower costs of maintenance and are governed by locally suited rules. New approaches for governance are being proposed (45), and new technologies for efficient and "smart irrigation" are being developed for the IRB (46). These developments suggest that systemic changes and new pathways will continue to charac terize the region with important implications for sustainability. ...
Sustainability challenges related to food production arise from multiple nature-society interactions occurring over long time periods. Traditional methods of quantitative analysis do not represent long-term changes in the networks of system components, including institutions and knowledge that affect system behavior. Here, we develop an approach to study system structure and evolution by combining a qualitative framework that represents sustainability-relevant human, technological, and environmental components, and their interactions, mediated by knowledge and institutions, with network modeling that enables quantitative metrics. We use this approach to examine the water and food system in the Punjab province of the Indus River Basin in Pakistan, exploring how food production has been sustained, despite high population growth, periodic floods, and frequent political and economic disruptions. Using network models of five periods spanning 75 y (1947 to 2022), we examine how quantitative metrics of network structure relate to observed sustainability-relevant outcomes and how potential interventions in the system affect these quantitative metrics. We find that the persistent centrality of some and evolving centrality of other key nodes, coupled with the increasing number and length of pathways connecting them, are associated with sustaining food production in the system over time. Our assessment of potential interventions shows that regulating groundwater pumping and phasing out fossil fuels alters network pathways, and helps identify potential vulnerabilities for future food production.
... 8 To counteract societal fracturing, Pakistan needs to address its water distribution problems, significantly strengthened global measures to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and more action to improve water quality. 4,9 Prior to the devastating floods in 2022, the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources estimated that the country may not have clean water resources by 2025. 10 Nationwide, little progress in wastewater treatment has been achieved over the last two decades. The proportion of people with access to sewer or septic sanitation has been stagnant, estimated at ∼45% for both 2000 and 2017. ...
Many communities in Pakistan use unsafe water polluted by domestic or industrial activities. Water treatment infrastructure is hardly in place, while the country’s socioeconomics jeopardize its maintenance and improvement. Especially in rural areas, any cost-effective and passive solution to improve water quality is a boon. Here we present the successful application of a full-scale floating treatment wetland (FTW) for attenuating pollutant concentration in a crude oil wastewater pit. Floating rafts, covering about 1/3 of the pit’s water surface area (10,000 m2), were established using indigenous wetland plants. Successful removal of organics (>97%), hydrocarbons (99.6%), total dissolved solids (82%), heavy metals, and toxicity was recorded within six-months. Mass balance confirmed removal of organics up to 2.63 × 105 whereas carbon sequestration by FTW was 2.11 × 103 kg. About 500,000 m3 of wastewater received treatment at a cost of US$0.0184 per m3, which was later reduced to US$0.0033 per m3. A cross-sectional survey illuminated that application of the FTW positively impacted lives of local communities. The FTW also became a new habitat for native bird species, thus underscoring the improved water quality and highlighting the study’s alignment with the United Nations Environment Program to better conditions for water supply and biodiversity.
Many communities in Pakistan use unsafe water polluted by domestic or industrial activities. Water treatment infrastructure is hardly in place, while the country’s socioeconomics jeopardizes its maintenance and improvement. Especially in rural areas, any cost-effective and passive solution to improve water quality is a boon. Here we present the successful application of a full-scale floating treatment wetland (FTW) for attenuating the pollutant concentration in a crude oil wastewater pit. Floating rafts, covering about 1/3 of the pit’s water surface area (10,000 m2), were established using indigenous wetland plants. Successful removal of organics (>97%), hydrocarbons (99.6%), total dissolved solids (82%), heavy metals, and toxicity was recorded within six-months. Mass balance confirmed removal of organics up to 2.63 × 105, whereas carbon sequestration by FTW was 2.11 × 103 kg. About 500,000 m3 of wastewater received treatment at a cost of US$0.0184 per m3, which was later reduced to US$0.0033 per m3. A cross-sectional survey illuminated that application of the FTW positively impacted the lives of local communities. The FTW also became a new habitat for native bird species, thus underscoring the improved water quality and highlighting the study’s alignment with the United Nations Environment Program for better conditions for water supply and biodiversity.
