ISLAMABAD: Islamabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ICCI) has urged the government for focusing on the construction of more dams, especially in flood-prone areas to cope with flash floods and generating cheap energy.
In a statement on Monday ICCI President, Muzzamil Hussain Sabri, said that devastating floods due to recent rains have highlighted urgent need of constructing more dams and water reservoirs in the country.
He said due to lack of dams and water reservoirs country has suffered losses in terms of death of people, damage to infrastructure and crop destruction over huge areas.
The World Bank has also estimated economic losses in excess of $18 billion because of natural disasters in the last one decade and another study shows that Pakistan's economy is facing annual loss of $36 billion due to water wastage, he remarked.
He said the climate change and global warming have accelerated the pace of glaciers melting causing heavy rains in monsoon with flood becoming every year's phenomenon.
This situation, he said could be turned into an opportunity by building more dams and water storage facilities in the country to store huge amount of rain water.
Industrial growth and economic development of our country mostly depended on agriculture. But, water resources were depleting while huge amount of rain water was being lost and wasted in the seas due to lack of storage facilities, he added.
He said there was an urgent need to reactivate and gear up disaster management systems to cope with flash floods. He said the existing dams are also silting up leaving reduced capacity to store water.
In these circumstances the country needs to construct more dams to store adequate water adding that availability of dams and water storage facilities would bring plenty of benefits to the country as it will help in reducing floods damages, generating sufficient amount of cheap electricity, facilitating sustainable agriculture growth and ensuring food security.
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