ISLAMABAD: Indus River System Authority (IRSA) on Tuesday received Water Accord Apportionment Tool (WAA-Tool) for equitable water distributions among the provinces.
This tool has been developed in two years through collaboration between the Ministry of Water Resources (MoWR), IRSA, Wapda, provincial irrigation departments (PIDs), and the Australian government through the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
The tool was handed over in a virtual ceremony held at IRSA headquarter, Islamabad on Tuesday
The IRSA chairman and Members, technical personnel and representatives of PIDs, Wapda, the Australian High Commission in Islamabad and CSIRO attended this ceremony.
Chairman Rao Irshad Ali Khan commended all those involved in the development process. Subsequently, he thanked the Australian government, which through its leading national science agency of CSIRO, provided the financial and technical resources to prepare the tool. The IRSA Members also appreciated the assistance and efforts in this regard.
The representatives of PIDs and Wapda expressed similar views. In contrast, the Australian High Commission and CSIRO thanked the Pakistani stakeholders for their complete help and facilitation during the development process. The IRSA Chairman, however, requested the Australian government and CSIRO to enhance the tool further to accommodate the mid-season review process, if possible.
Since 1991, water resources in the Indus River System have been shared among the four provinces according to the Water Apportionment Accord (WAA) 1991. The accord describes broad water-sharing principles but not the precise mechanism of how these principles are to be executed in the seasonal planning process. On request from Pakistani partners (IRSA, PIDs, Wapda) to support their seasonal water planning, a collaborative project was established to develop a software product (called the WAA-Tool).
The tool captures undocumented procedures in a repeatable process; provide transparency and consistency in seasonal water allocation; enables more equitable and efficient sharing of water resources; provides the capability to explore alternate system operationally rules and ensures more transparency, efficiency, and equity in water sharing. It can explore the impacts of different inflow forecasts, reduced storages, and climate change on provincial sharing.
The development of the tool is in line with the objectives of National Water Policy (NWP).
The tool captures the complete 10-day allocation processes as elicited from all concerned. The process was agreed upon between the stakeholders and encoded in the WAA-Tool. The tool has been successfully tested and used for Kharif 2020 and Rabi 2020-21 which is now the tool of choice for Pakistani water agencies for seasonal planning and allocation of river water. The tool forecasts Rim-Station inflows and performs system operation by running the reservoirs on set rules, routing the flows in the river network with accompanying losses/ gains, allocating shares to the provinces on different sharing options, and releasing excess water downstream Kotri, if available. It follows the same statistical and analytical techniques as manually adopted by IRSA and thus saves a lot of time by calculating alternative system operation in a matter of seconds. With this ease of fast computing, the tool has the capacity to calculate and present with different system operation scenarios, which previously consumed a lot of time. Calculations of the tool for Anticipated Criteria Rabi 2020-21 matched exactly with the assessments of IRSA and the shortage predicted by the tool was also 10%.
The tool interface adopts a modern web-style interface. While the first release is designed to run on desktop computers, it can be enhanced to run on a central server or in the cloud. It replicates the entire water allocation process; allows discussion on alternate sharing options like reservoir storage carries forward; provides better data management; less experienced stakeholders can understand the allocation process quickly; aids the building of a consensus between the provinces. Parameter settings, such as reservoir fill rates, can be easily changed to trial possible and potential combinations of climates, inflows, and reservoir management. Results are stored using a database management system that guarantees its integrity, i.e. the data cannot be changed in the database.