KARACHI: Reduced water supply degrading Indus Delta
By Bhagwandas
KARACHI, Dec 16: Speakers at a workshop here on Monday expressed concern over the continued degradation of the Indus Delta, and said if remedial measures were not taken immediately, this biodiversity sensitive region would face irreversible damage.
On the first day of the “Five-day Workshop on Bringing Stakeholders Together to Develop a Common Vision for the Indus Ecoregion,” organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature, they said the degradation of the delta would have a multidimensional effect on people, land, and environment.
They said the Indus Delta Ecoregion was among the five such regions marked by the WWF under its Global 200 ecoregion programme which had marked out 237 highly sensitive ecoregions worldwide that were facing various threats. They added that the concept of the ecoregion had been developed keeping in view the characteristics of the region and it was not restricted to just one country.
They said five ecoregions in the country are the Tibetan Plateau Steppe (comprising ares in Afghanistan, China, India, Pakistan and Tajikistan); Western Himalayan Temperate Forests (Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal); Rann of Kachh Flooded Grasslands (India and Pakistan); Indus River Delta (Pakistan and India); and North Arabian Sea (Djibouti, Iran, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, the UAE and Yemen).
They said the Indus Delta ecoregion had been given priority as it related to fresh water which was a top priority issue as it was scarce, and the situation regrading fresh water was expected to become even worse. Besides the region of the delta comprised only two countries and that also nearly 95 per cent of the delta was in Pakistan, so whatever strategy was formulated it would be comparatively easier to implement as there were few international stakeholders involved.
They expressed concern over the lack of information and awareness of the significance of the delta region even at the top government level as the president and ministers, etc, had time and again said water going downstream the Kotri Barrage was going to waste as it was going into the sea, little realizing the importance of the deltaic region.
The speakers said the reduced supply of fresh water affected the delta adversely as the mangrove forests needed fresh water for their survival. They added that mangroves were nurseries of many commercially important marine food species such as prawns, lobsters, shrimps, etc.
They said the roots of mangroves worked as a strengthening and binding force in the coastal swamp lands thus saving the shoreline. They said with the delta receiving less fresh water, which earlier pushed back and kept the brackish seawater into its limits in the sea, the seawater made intrusions into the coastal lands and was thus ruining the rich agricultural fields.
They said in this way the coastline was damaged, fisheries, on which livelihood of hundreds of thousands of fishermen depended, were affected, and thousands of acres of rich agricultural land were affected crippling the economy of the thousands of farmers.
They said the Indus Basin Irrigation System - with its three major reservoirs, 19 barrages, 12 inter-river link canals, and handling over 106 million acre feet (MAF) surface water - was one of the largest integrated irrigation networks in the world and it was also supplemented by an annual groundwater extraction of 43 MAF.
They said before the construction of upstream dams, or before 1960, nearly 70 MAF went into the sea, but after the construction of upstream reservoirs the quantity of water going into the sea had been reduced to around 32 MAF which was affecting the delta, in general, and the mangroves, in particular. They said later, after the Indus Water Accord was signed in the early 1990s, at least 10 MAF were guaranteed for the delta but even that was not being supplied regularly and in many years the delta had received little water.
They said with less water coming to Sindh the riverine forests that solely depended on flooding in the Indus were also affected and shrinking.
They added that due to less water coming to the delta it had resulted in seawater intrusion seriously affecting over 250,000 hectares in the coastal belt. Giving a breakup, they said over 91,000 hectares were affected in Jati Taluka in Thatta district. Other talukas along with the affected land in the district were Kharo Chhan (47,000 hectares); Keti Bander (46,000); Mirpur Sakro (24,000); Shah Bander (23,000) and Ghora Bari (12,000).
They said since the lobbies that wanted to stop the water from going to the sea had more money, influence, education, knowledge, etc, they presented their case effectively in the corridors of power, while the stakeholders in the deltaic region, such as the fishing communities, farmers, etc, were usually illiterate, poor and having no influence, so their point of view was usually not heard by the ruling elite.
They said the fan-shaped Indus Delta having 17 major and innumerable minor creeks and spread over 600,000 hectares - approximately 160,000 hectares of which were under mangrove cover - had been classified the sixth largest delta in the world.
Highlighting the importance of the Indus delta ecoregion, the speakers said it also had two freshwater lakes - Haleji and Keenjhar - which were Ramsar Sites and played host to over 250,000 migratory waterfowl during winter. It also had three brackish and saltwater lakes - Shah Bander salt waste, Jafri lake, Nurri Jubo (Ramsar Site), and Mahboob Shah Lake and together they played host to over 20,000 migratory waterfowl during winter.
They said the ecoregion could be divided into five major habitats - main river course; riverine forests; freshwater lakes; brackish and salt water lakes and the main delta, and some of the rare wildlife species found in the area were the Indus Dolphin, Green and Olive Ridley turtles, gavial (now almost extinct), wild boar, jackals, Asian wolves, hog deer, Pacific-Humpback dolphin, Bottle-nose dolphins, palla fish, etc.
Dr Ghulam Rasool Keerio, Dr Khaliq Ansari, S. I. H. Jafri, Dr Quddusi B. Kazmi, Dr Syed Kamaluddin, Ali Hasan Habib, Dr Ejaz Ahmad, Dr Hasan Moinuddin, Salman Ashraf and others also spoke.
Later, four focus groups were formed to discuss in detail the subjects of (a) Fresh water resources; (b) riverine and coastal forests; (c) fish resources and (d) invertebrates and insects of the Indus Delta.
