Abstract
For a country to be water secure, it must balance water access for diverse human needs, including for health, and must manage the resource to preserve a sustainable human-nature ecosystem. Recent water policies recognise this diversity and related challenges. Despite these advances, Pakistan’s history includes many failures to move related programs forward. The governance structures of the main policies, such as the National Water Policy and the Punjab Water Policy, implicitly assume that current departments or ministries are adequate to the job. With the preponderance of irrigation and agriculture representatives on councils and committees, this is unlikely to be easy to achieve. This chapter uses a socio-hydrological framework to argue that the contribution of water to sustainable development needs to be based on accurate measurement, valuation, and decision-making grounded in a system that takes account of the complex interplay of human actions and water systems – and that these will only be effective if they are embedded in strong consultative governance institutions. This framework was used to assess the way forward using two examples, groundwater management and the challenge of allocating water to the Indus Delta.
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Acknowledgement
We thank Taimoor Akhtar, College of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada for his input in this chapter.
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Davies, S., Watto, M.A., Sattar, E. (2021). Ways Forward to Improve Water Security in Pakistan. In: Watto, M.A., Mitchell, M., Bashir, S. (eds) Water Resources of Pakistan. World Water Resources, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65679-9_15
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