Sustainable urban water conservation strategy for a planned city of a developing country: a perspective from DHA City Karachi

Pakistan, previously a water-surplus country, is now a water-stressed country. Water is essential to achieve sustainable urban development, and the use of alternate water resources could provide essential support to urban development in the water crisis scenario. In water-scarce areas, where new water resource implementation is very difficult, water conservation practices serve efficiently and valuably. The study area, DHA City Karachi (DCK), has been visualized as Pakistan’s first city which will likely serve as a role model for the future independent planned cities in the developing world. In this study, after water demand estimation for the study area, water conservation techniques have been implemented using scenario-based model approach. These techniques are water efficient fixtures (WEF) usages, dry cooling in power plant (DCP), grey water recycling (GWR), and black water recycling (BWR). The designed strategy implementation provides an overall 54% water reduction. The result shows that the best water demand reduction strategy is the deployment of WEF which is 59% of the total water reduction. Thus, the results of the study suggest that similar scenario-based urban water conservation strategies can be implemented for other regions of the world having water scarcity.