IRSA meets to discuss WAA Tool, proposes further development.

ISLAMABAD -- Indus River System Authority (IRSA) on Wednesday met with Zahid Hussain Junejo in the chair to discuss the progress/uptake of the Water Accord Apportionment (WAA) Tool and proposed further developments.

The software Tool had been developed jointly by collaboration between Ministry of Water Resources (MoWR), IRSA, WAPDA, Provincial Irrigation Departments (PIDs) and the Australian Government through Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), said a press release.

The software Tool was developed over the past 3 years.

After this technical discussion, a ceremony was held at Ministry of Water Resources (MoWR) to officially handover WAA Tool report to Syed Muhammad Mehr Ali Shah, Joint Secretary (MOWR), IRSA, WAPDA and representatives of provincial irrigation department.

Representative ACIAR appreciated the collaborative association of all the stakeholders in the development of the Tool, especially IRSA's role.

The tool had initially included pre-seasonal planning capability, which was being effectively applied by different stakeholder agencies, at present.

He suggested that an Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) Plan, taking into consideration all factors at play, to explore their mutual interaction and influences on each other, should be prepared.

Efficient and integrated management of the water resources was the responsibility of the present generation to be able to pass it on as legacy to the next generations for sustainability of the Indus Basin Irrigation System (IBIS).

Representative CSIRO briefed IRSA about the development profile of the Tool and said that its objective was to bring consistency, transparency and ensure equity in distribution of the surface supplies of the IBIS between the signatories of the WAA, capturing complex IBIS river and reservoir operations and automizing them into a user-friendly software tool and capacity building of the stakeholder organisations.

He said that accurate and reliable pre-seasonal planning was of utmost importance due to the sensitivity of meeting with the provincial demands in time in the face of limited 10% storage capacity of the system, rapidly declining reliability of reservoir storage as a result of sedimentation, excessive inflow variability and its disturbed timing under Climate Change scenarios, compounded at the same time by increasing water demands.

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