LAHORE: Pakistan urgently needs to improve institutional capacity for flood risk management as it was not able to develop disaster risk management plans for state and district levels, it is learnt.
According to status documents for Disaster and Climate Resilience Improvement available with Pakistan Today, no risk identification studies have been completed despite 2017 deadline.
Additionally, the Punjab irrigation department (PID) wasn’t able to establish a Decision Support System (DSS), besides it can only rehabilitate 10 per cent length of the embankments.
The documents indicate that development and adoption of operational procedures for responding to disasters are still missing, while draft state and districts plans are available; however, these are yet to be approved.
The PID has awarded civil works contracts for over US$ 15 million Priority-I sub-projects. The Priority-II sub-projects are being designed with the PMIC, in the process of carrying out topographic surveys of the project sites.
The PIU / PMIC are on track to award all Priority-II civil works contracts by December 2017. The average implementation time of the works ranges from 6 – 9 months. The PID has also initiated the procurement process for the establishment of a decision support system and carrying out river morphology studies in Punjab.
Punjab’s Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) has hired a firm to undertake a capacity assessment of the PDMA, based on which the institutional strengthening activities were to be designed.
The documents indicate that after five years of its enactment, the NDM Act 2010 is not yet fully implemented, and details on how to operationalise it are still to be defined.
At federal level—while the necessary legal, institutional and policy measures have been taken by the Government of Pakistan for DRM—there are a number of entities working on DRM with overlapping mandates in addition to the NDMA. These include the Earthquake Reconstruction & Rehabilitation Authority (ERRA), the Emergency Relief Cell (ERC), and the Federal Flood Commission (FFC), among others.
At a provincial level, the multiplicity of institutions is also present, which includes, PDMAs, the Provincial Irrigation Departments (PIDs), and the civil defence and rescue services.
PDMAs also have differing capacities across provinces and administrative regions; similarly, DDMAs have only been established in selected districts and their operational capacity varies significantly.
There is a need to advance the implementation of the NDM Act 2010, through greater clarity in functional mandates, strengthening capacities of disaster management institutions, and operationalisation of disaster management funds at the federal, provincial and district levels.
