News Desk
Islamabad, Dec 17: Pakistan faces a set of overlapping pressures across climate, water, and energy systems. Increasingly variable river flows, floods, and energy demands intersect in ways that affect planning, infrastructure performance, and resource management.
Recent extreme events have highlighted gaps in both planning and response, showing how institutional assumptions, rigid engineering models, and limited integration of community knowledge can exacerbate vulnerability.
Decisions in one sector have consequences across others, making it essential to understand these interdependencies and identify coordinated approaches to infrastructure and governance challenges.
Addressing these layered pressures requires a space where evidence, experience, and institutional insight can meet in a practical, solutions-focused conversation.
In this regard a national dialogue has been designed to provide a structured space for evidence-based discussion, bringing together public representatives, policymakers, technical experts, researchers, and activists.
Organised by Verrha Research and the National Institute of Pakistan Studies with support from partner organisations, the day-long event aims to strengthen shared understanding and support evidence-informed approaches across water, energy, and climate systems.
It also aims to support more responsive, grounded, and climate-aware approaches to Pakistan’s water, energy, and infrastructure challenges, providing a foundation for sustained multi-stakeholder engagement by connecting analytical, institutional, and community perspectives.
The participants including community representatives will explore connection between climate variabilities, floods, hydropower, energy demands, and climate impacts, infrastructure, and energy planning challenges in two sessions to align perspectives across sectors and improve understanding of on-the-ground realities relevant to planning and implementation.
They will share insights, clarify operational and planning challenges, and identify practical solutions that can strengthen system performance, improve coordination, and enhance decision-making under changing conditions.
This will be followed by expert panels to explore institutional strategies, technical options, and governance considerations. They will touch on issues such as flood management, infrastructure resilience, hydropower planning, sedimentation and flow variability, and lessons from smaller-scale adaptive systems.
The ultimate goal of the dialogue is to support informed decision-making and identify practical improvements to planning and operations as well as to generate actionable insights and a post-event brief that highlights key divergences and points of convergence between evidence, assumptions, and practice.
The event will be held at Margalla Hotel on 18th of this month.
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