Some twenty years after Pakistan’s independence, an exploration sponsored by WWF—UK revealed that wildlife and wetlands resources in Pakistan were severely threatened and, in most areas, declining in condition. The expedition report prepared by Mountfort (1967) recommended that a range of wetland sites be declared Protected Areas. Other early efforts included extensive surveys made by Savage (1967- 1970) and Koning (1970, 1976, 1987 and 1989).
Koning’s field work was supported by the International Wetlands Research Bureau (IWRB) and he made the first ever effort to train provincial conservation staff in waterfowl identification. Pakistan ratified the Ramsar Convention in 1975 and, simultaneously, nine wetland sites were somewhat hastily recognised by the Ramsar Bureau as being of international importance. Early inventory work tended to be confined to readily accessible wetland sites, In 1980, IUCN compiled A Directory of Wetlands of International Importance in the Western Palaearctic. This was followed by the International Council for Bird Preservation’s preliminary Inventory of Wetlands in East Asia. The Directory of Asian Wetlands prepared by Scott (1989) listed 52 sites in Pakistan, based on the work of the NCCW and other agencies. Scott and Poole (1989) subsequently compiled an overview of important wetlands in Asia that featured some of the resources in Pakistan. In 1987 Wetlands International (WI) initiated a mid winter waterfowl census in the region and government staff from a range of institutions have participated in this survey series annually since that time. The Pakistan National Conservation Strategy (1992) included the protection of watersheds and water bodies as two of fourteen major programme areas for priority implementation. A report based on joint surveys by the NCCW and Ramsar Bureau in 1990 identified priorities for action including surveys, conservation measures, awareness raising, management and applied research. The report recommended rationalising the existing list of Ramsar sites. As a consequence, several were amalgamated into a complex, three existing sites were withdrawn from the list and two others added, bringing the total number of Ramsar sites in March 1996, to eight.