LAND-use planning is an imperative tool in social and economic profiling of the cities including future size, structure and population distribution. It also serves as a long-term policy lever for agricultural and industrial development.

Although Pakistan is endowed with vast fertile lands, flowing rivers, coastal zones and mountains rich in mineral wealth it is predominantly a dry land country. Nearly two-thirds of its population primarily depend on agropastoral activities for their livelihood.

Out of the country’s 79.6m hectares, only 20m ha are suitable for agriculture. An estimated 55pc of the rural population live on fragile lands that are prone to desertification. The country’s densely populated cities pose growing food security concerns. Urbanisation has had adverse impacts on agricultural landscape, forest cover, rapid depletion of surface and groundwater bodies and climate change.

For instance, ‘expanding Lahore’, due to rapid housing developments, is occupying fertile land mass and diminishing agricultural activities. The green belts around Lahore, Rawalpindi, Faisalabad and Multan have vanished. Until 1990s these green belts were main source of fresh and cheap vegetables.

Pakistan needs to take prompt action in shaping and implementing its land-use policies to meet the evolving challenges

The rapid development and uncontrolled concentration of housing around Lahore has resulted in lowering groundwater levels. It is an alarming situation for the future of this mega city. It is estimated that about 70pc Pakistanis depend on groundwater. In Lahore the water table level has gone down to more than 40 metres from only 4.5 metres below surface a couple of decades ago. The main reasons of this decline are excessive pumping compared to recharge as well as reduction in the rate of recharge to aquifers due to concrete cover by infrastructural developments making land impermeable.

Another setback is the country’s geo-political position that resulted in progressive water reduction in River Ravi from India and eventually ending to zero flows after the construction of Thein Dam upstream of Madhopur headworks in India in 2000. The Ravi remains dry except in monsoon season. Its domino effect is the decline in groundwater levels in the adjoining areas.

In addition to reducing farming, thousands of trees have been cut down to accommodate housing societies in the suburbs of major cities.

This social negligence gives rise to many abuses such as enhanced air and water pollution, rise in street temperature, less immunity for children from ultra-violet rays to prevent skin cancer.

Pakistan needs to take prompt action in shaping and implementing its land-use policies to meet the evolving challenges: the land-use directly impacts the national food and water security.

Have tens of housing societies around Lahore been approved after proper risk assessment in terms of securing country’s fertile lands? Obviously ‘not’ as land-use planning has been a disregarded sector in the country for last several decades. In many housing societies hardly 10pc of the developed plots have houses and remaining are vacant. Why? Most of these societies lack public amenities and infrastructure but occupy fertile and productive lands.

This emphasises the need of prudent land-use in the urban planning to optimise the placement of housing, roads, water supply, sewerage, graveyards, open spaces, agricultural belts and industrial areas.

Unfortunately, no land-use plans exist either at national, provincial, district or local levels. The barriers to proper system of adequate land-use planning are; insufficient quantitative data on current land-use as well as status of natural resources and their utilisation trends; severe deficiencies in knowledge related to land management due to outdated and intricate system, rehabilitation of degraded ecosystems, unsustainable agriculture and livestock production; scattered information across many institutions and its unavailability to researchers, planners and policymakers and finally lack of supporting legislation.

Pakistan needs to develop a fully digitised GIS based Land Information System (LIS) that could effectively facilitate administrative and economic decision-making. The country has to be mapped on a workable scale in terms of documenting its cadastral boundaries, mineral occurrences, soil fertility, water resources, agriculture, population density and growth rate trends.

Other data sets to be essentially maintained include: satellite images, earthquake, floods and landslide hazard maps and industrial manufacturing needs for rural and urban areas.

Pakistan requires a comprehensive and integrated approach for land-use planning for formulation and implementation of national policies for protecting land resources and supporting economy. The purpose of land-use planning is to regulate land-use in an efficient and ethical way to minimise the brutal impacts of its exploitation. The positive impacts of proper land-use on economy will support poverty eradication and sustained economic growth.

atteequr@yahoo.com

Published in Dawn, Business & Finance weekly, January 25th, 2016