ANSO-COMSATS conference concludes: artificial intelligence serves sustainable water management
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Four days in Islamabad, thirty-three experts from twelve countries, and one takeaway: artificial intelligence is no longer a research tool in the water sector; it has become the infrastructure that remaps both scarcity and flooding.
The ANSO-COMSATS conference on AI-enabled solutions for sustainable water governance, security and safety concluded its session, organised by the Committee on Science and Technology for Sustainable Development in the South (COMSATS) with support from the CAS-ANSO conference grant. The event was not merely an academic gathering; it was attended by the ambassador of Palestine and the ambassador of Sri Lanka, senior diplomats from Zimbabwe and Indonesia, and representatives of the National Centre for Physics and the Science Foundation of the Economic Cooperation Organization.
What happened behind closed doors:Seven technical sessions covered monitoring, forecasting and early-warning systems, hands-on training on AI tools, and field visits to Pakistan's Water Resources Research Council, the National Agricultural Research Centre, and Qaed-e-Azam University. The stated goal: translate knowledge into concrete actions before the opportunity slips away.
The regional angle that matters to you:Among the participating countries, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, all three face escalating water stress. Prime Minister’s climate-change coordinator Romina Khorshid said Pakistan endured the catastrophic floods of 2022 and now confronts a dual dilemma: scarcity in some regions and floods in others. The solution she proposes is not a promise but the integration of climate resilience into national policies, coupled with the use of AI to secure the water future.
Ambassador Dr. Mohamed Nazeef Zakaria, executive director of COMSATS, framed the issue strategically: water challenges are shared across nations, and a collective solution is a necessity, not an option, especially among developing Southern countries. This is precisely why the conference is highly relevant to the Gulf, Egypt and the Levant, where water infrastructure shares vulnerability to climate extremes and the opportunity offered by predictive modelling and automated monitoring.
The lasting takeaway after the conference’s closure: the technology is present, data are flowing, and the gathered minds have spoken. The question each water-resources official in the region poses is not “Does AI work?” but “When will we start deploying it nationally?”