Early warning system offered for Peshawar

The Al-Khidmat Foundation has offered to finance early warning system for Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa which is a disaster-prone city in the province. The offer came during a group discussion on `multiple hazards vulnerability and risk assessment of Peshawar district` the organization said it would install early warning system if the district government provided land for it. The Al-Khidmat Foundation and Riphah University jointly organised the event, which was attended by academicians and officials of the relevant departments. The system costs around Rs30 million and also requires one kanal of land. Though prone to multiple disasters, including flash floods, riverine and urban flooding, Peshawar doesn`t have an early warning system for them. Dr Attaur Rehman, who teaches at the Department of Geography, University of Peshawar, says the rapid and unplanned urbanisation will swallow the entire agricultural land of Peshawar district in the next 50 years. `There is a need for a specific legislation to immediately stop the conversion of agricultural land into residential and commercial areas in Peshawar district otherwise there will be no farmland left in the next 50 years,` he said. The data collected by the revenue department show that the rapid urbanisation and unplanned construction have swallowed more than 3,307 acres of agricultural land in Peshawar district over the last one and a half decade. According to it, the total agricultural land in the provincial capital was 109,883 acres in 2001-02 but that shrank to 106,576 acres in 2013-14. The agricultural land is also under pressure in the adjoining districts of Nowshera and Charsadda due to the unplanned urbanisation. The government has yet to legislate on how to regulate utilisation of land and stop conversion of farmlands into commercial activities. Dr Rehman said Peshawar was among the top districts exposed to the multiple manmade and natural disasters as it did not have any system to forecast nullah flooding. He said the national warning system did not cover streams and seasonal nullahs of Peshawar, which saw devastations caused by urban and riverine floods every year. Khan Zeb, an official of the Water and Sanitation Services Peshawar, said the situation was deteriorating due to non-implementation of the building bylaws in the district. He called for the implementation of the relevant laws to prevent urban flooding in the capital. The official said the level of groundwater in the district was also going down. A joint declaration issued after the discussion said the environmental degradation and climate change had increased the likelihood and intensity of natural hazards in Peshawar and other parts of the country. It demanded one per cent budget allocation for climate change adaptation in the next financial year and the use of 50 per cent of it for mapping and assessment related research and development. The declaration suggested that aH projects related to the proposed China Pakistan Economic Corridor include prior environmental assessments and hazard mapping in line with the NDMA`s National DRR Policy 2013 with the effective DRR plans on all CPEC routes. It called for the establishment of independent district disaster management units fully equipped with trained people and autonomous in implementing the guidelines in all 105 districts of the country.