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Pakistan has created a wildlife sanctuary along 123 miles of the Indus River where it’s estimated 440 of these extraordinary freshwater cetaceans live.
The endangered Indus River Dolphin has seen large declines in the amount of river it’s able to access as Pakistan’s economic growth drove river infrastructure projects like dams and irrigation canals.
Some 2,000 are believed to remain, with pockets of the population divided across 3 stretches of the Indus River totaling around 430 miles.
With the Punjab government’s creation of the Punjnad Indus River Dolphin Sanctuary, it not only safeguards the heart of the dolphin’s habitat in Punjab, but connects it with an existing protected area in neighboring Sindh Province, creating roughly 249 miles—about the length of New York State—of connected habitat under legal protection, according to WWF-Pakistan.
The WWF chapter will work closely with the governments in Islamabad and Punjab to development a management plan for the sanctuary to ensure the dolphins therein can thrive, not merely survive.
The organization has been working since the 1990s in the conservation of the dolphin, and points out that as an apex predator in the waterway, its flourishing requires a whole-of-ecosystem flourishing. If the nation can but protect its dolphins, it may very well protect the whole riverine environment at the same time.
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