Leakage, inefficient domestic water use: people likely to be vulnerable to water shortages: ADB report

Asian Development Bank (ADB) has said that people in Pakistan are likely to be particularly vulnerable to water shortages due to leakage, inefficient domestic water use, or underinvestment in providing access, especially in rural and slum areas.
The Bank in its recent report titled 'Green Growth, Resources and Resilience: Environmental Sustainability in Asia and the Pacific' has said that the availability of water is a major factor in food security, as nearly 70 percent of freshwater withdrawals are for agriculture, mainly for irrigation. However, high proportions of water for agriculture do not always translate into benefits for reducing poverty and hunger. This situation is extreme in all water stressed countries like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Tajikistan where more than 90 percent of water is used for agriculture, yet more than one in five people in these countries remained undernourished in 2005.
The report says that the people in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Fiji, Kazakhstan, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea and Sri Lanka, and are likely to be particularly vulnerable to water shortages. The report reveals that the food security is of particular concern, since about 545 million people in Asia and the Pacific still consume less than the global standard of 2,200 calories/day, while many more suffer periods of relative deprivation due to seasonal variation in food availability.
According to the report, Pakistan is among those countries that exhibit higher undernourishment rates than expected like China, India, the Laos People's Democratic Republic, , Vanuatu and Viet Nam.
Green Growth, Resources and Resilience: Environmental Sustainability in Asia and the Pacific says that Asia registered a net gain of some 2.2 million hectares of forest annually in the last decade; this was largely due to the expansion of forest plantations based on non-native species (in China, India and Viet Nam. Large-scale afforestation programmes contributed to the annual expansion of forest area by a total of nearly 4 million hectares in the last five years).
In many other countries, rapid conversion of forest lands to other uses has continued. In Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Armenia, Cambodia, and Malaysia total loss of forest cover appears to have accelerated. According to the ADB report, the urban residents in many countries have responded to resource gaps and ineffective government by taking matters into their own hands, forming forums and civil society organisations that have addressed problems directly or pressured local government into addressing the problems. The Urban Resource Centre (URC) in Karachi, Pakistan, for example, developed an information base through which it can critique government plans and planning processes.