The glass is half full: Positive aspects of floods

Saline soils swept by floods have now turned productive.

GILGIT: While Pakistan is still reeling from the destruction left by the floods, a veteran environmentalist stands confident to say that not all is lost in the aftermath of the deluge, and there are many positives.

“Floods are an essential part of the natural phenomena and they occur regularly,” Dr Ghulam Akbar told The Express Tribune. He is currently heading ‘Pakistan Wetlands Programme’, one of the largest conservation programmes in the country.

He said that the floods have turned brackish water lakes like Manchar into freshwater lakes, a task that otherwise was not possible even after spending huge financial resources.

The environmentalist said that it was the first time after many years that, “we acquired land from the sea in the deltaic region mainly due to deposition of millions of tonnes of silt carried through by the flood.”

“New mud-flats have appeared which will certainly benefit the mangrove forests in days to come,” he said, adding that aquatic biodiversity all over the Indus plain has increased in the wake of floods.

Dr Akbar, who until recently was performing his duties in Karachi for one of WWF’s projects, said that now one can find fish species in Sindh that were never seen before. “Same is the case with plants as new species have also appeared,” he said, and added that the floods have raised the importance of land use plans and flood management concepts in Pakistan.

He said that another benefit of the recent floods is that they have almost freed the riverine belt (Kacho area) from encroachers. In the British era a protective embankment was constructed, starting from Kashmore to Thatta Districts along either side of the River Indus. The terrain within them is called riverine area and is the property of the state.

Akbar said that all the saline and saline-sodic soils submerged by the floods are now free from salinity and have turned into productive soils.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 25^th, 2010.