World Water Day 2014: Water and Energy

Dr. Zahidul Islam and Sarfaraz Alam

Like every other years, the 22 March of 2014 is being observed as the World Water Day, focusing on the importance of freshwater and advocating for the sustainable management of freshwater resources. Following a recommendation from the United Nations (UN) Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992, the UN General Assembly designated 22 March 1993 as the first World Water Day. Since then, each year World Water Day is observed, highlighting a specific aspect of freshwater. So far different aspects like Caring for Our Water Resources, Women and Water, Water for Thirsty Cities, Groundwater, Everyone lives Downstream, Water for the 21st Century, Water for Health, Water for Development, Water for the Future, Water and Disaster, Water and Culture, Water Scarcity, Sanitation, Transboundary Waters, Water Quality, Water for Cities, Water and Food Security have been highlighted. In the meantime water decade (1995-2005) was celebrated with a title “Water and Life” and 2013 was declared as the “International Year of Water Cooperation”. Emphasising the interdependency of water and energy, this year World Water Day slogan is “Water and Energy”. This article is an effort to demonstrate the inter-dependency between water and energy in global context as well as in Bangladesh perspective.

National Water Security Index of Bangladesh: What does it indicate?

Dr. Zahidul Islam and Ahmmed Zulfiqar Rahaman

Recently Asian Development Bank (ADB) has published the Asian Water Development Outlook 2013, a compilation of water resources development indicators in Asia and Pacific region. The entire report can be downloaded from THIS link. The status of water resources development in this region has been presented as the National Water Security Index (NWSI), and comparison has been made among different countries. National Water Security Index of a country is composed of five separate indices. The values of individual indices ranges from 1 to 5 and the average value represents the NWSI. The five individual indices are: Household Water Security Index, Economic Water Security Index, Urban Water Security Index, Environmental Water Security Index and Resilience to Water Related Disasters Index. The scope of this article is to evaluate the overall water security status of Bangladesh based on this report.

Review of the Bangladesh Water Act 2013

Dr. Md. Khalequzzaman and Dr. Zahidul Islam

The government of Bangladesh has recently published the Water Act 2013 (henceforth termed as the Act) through a gazette notification.  The Act is based on the National Water Policy, and is designed for integrated development, management, extraction, distribution, usage, protection and conservation of water resources in the country. The Act consists of 7 chapters, 47 sections and 136 sub-sections.  While the first chapter defines the terms and vocabularies used in the Act, the remaining chapters address various aspects of the Act.  We have taken a critical look at the Act and provided a review of the same.  In general, the Act has provided the right framework for better management of water resources in the country. 

The World Water Day 2013: Bangladesh Perspectives

Dr. Zahidul Islam and Dr. Md. Khalequzzaman 

Like every other years, the 22 March of 2013 is being observed as the World Water Day, focusing on the importance of freshwater and advocating for the sustainable management of freshwater resources. Following a recommendation from the United Nations (UN) Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992, the UN General Assembly designated 22 March 1993 as the first World Water Day. Since then, each year World Water Day is observed, highlighting a specific aspect of freshwater. So far different aspects like Caring for Our Water Resources, Women and Water, Water for Thirsty Cities, Groundwater, Everyone lives Downstream, Water for the 21st Century, Water for Health, Water for Development, Water for the Future, Water and Disaster, Water and Culture, Water Scarcity, Sanitation, Transboundary Waters, Water Quality, Water for Cities, Water and Food Security have been highlighted. This year, the focus is even broader, as the year 2013 has been declared as the International Year of Water Cooperation by the UN. It is evident that growing population and rapid urbanization is putting pressure on the freshwater resources of the world. In order to manage this precious resource, cooperation is essential between different users for the betterment of the environment and ecosystem. Hence, the slogan for the year 2013 World Water Day, “Water, Water Everywhere, Only If We Share” draws attention to the need for cooperation in water resources management. In this article we focus on the importance of cooperation in water management in context of Bangladesh. 

Shahbag Movement: The Expatriate Perspective

Zahidul Islam, Fahim Hassan, Ishtiaq Rouf, Rumana Reaz Arifin, 
Munawar Hafiz, Shantanu Banik, and Nafis Hasan 

We are expatriate Bangladeshis. Like the ordinary people of Bangladesh, we hold Bangladesh deep inside our hearts. That is exactly why, when we spend sleepless nights watching Bangladesh win in cricket, or the younger generation excelling at the math olympiads, we are as proud as ordinary Bangladeshis. Then again, when we hear of the corruption in Bangladesh through national and foreign media, we are ashamed, just like everybody else. When floods and cyclones ravage our country, we try our best to help those in need in Bangladesh. It's as if our whole existence is painted with red and green, the essence of my, our Bangladesh.

We are the constituents of that generation which didn't see the liberation war. We are the representatives of that generation who grew up reading the wrong and distorted history depicted in our textbooks. We are that unfortunate generation who saw the war criminals representing Bangladesh on both domestic and foreign soil. It is because we are members of such a generation, when we see the war criminals put on trial in our country, we tell others with great pride that even 41 years after our independence, we are going to bring these traitors to justice. 

Creating Polylines from Point Data in ArcGIS

ArcGIS users are quite familiar with adding point data in a form of shapefile from XY data (e.g. Lat/Lon entity). However, if there is a question of creating line or polyline data from those point shapefile, most of the GIS users have to think about it for a while. In my knowledge, I didn't find any built-in function to create polyline shapefile from point shapefile with a specific connectivity objectives. Or, If I say, creating polygon from point data, most of GIS users would agree with me regarding the possible challenges in doing so, using ArcGIS solely. However, in practice we do need to create line entity from point entity. For example, if we have the start and end coordinates of a fluid pipeline ( e.g. water, oil, or gas supply line) and we need do show the pipelines in a map, most of the GIS users will first create the point shapefiles using the coordinate and then probably create a line shapefile separately to connect those points. But how about thousands, or even more pipelines? In this post I'll try to show how we are going to solve this sort of problem using an wonderful tool ET GeoWizard. 

Bangladesh Transverse Mercator (BTM) Projection

In this post I'll try to give a very brief overview of Bangladesh Transverse Mercator (BTM) projection system and necessary parameters of BTM, along with the projection file (BTM.prj) that can be used directly into ArcGIS 9.x or later versions.

Geographic Information System (GIS) users are quite familiar of Map Projection, which is the method to represent the three dimensional earth surface into a two dimensional plane. Universal Mercator Projection (UTM) is a widely used projection system now-a-days in which the earth (between 80°S and 84°N latitude) is divided into sixty zones, each a six-degree band of longitude, and a secant transverse Mercator projection is used in each zone. For example, zone 1 covers longitude 180° to 174° W and then zone numbering increases eastward to zone 60 that covers longitude 174 to 180 East. In a zone, the coordinate of a point is given by the Northing and Easting. The intersection of the equator and the UTM zone's central meridian is considered as the point of origin of each UTM zone and the central meridian of each zone is set at 500,000 meters East to avoid negative numbers.