Pakistan in Media

The News International, Pakistan, Friday, July 17, 2009
Pakistan managed to break India's record on Wednesday -- and found a place in the Guinness Book of World Records -- by planting the largest number of trees in a single day. The feat was achieved in a frenetic exercise in Keti Bundar, on the Indus Delta, where a staggering 541,176 saplings were planted in a single day by some 400 trained workers, amid much fanfare from officials of the Sindh forest department and environmentalists. It goes without saying that this is a welcome and positive initiative. Pakistan's once thriving mangrove forests along its coasts have been rapidly depleting due to a combination of factors, including the construction of dams and human intervention. Mangroves not only serve as a nursery for shrimps and other fish, which constitute one of the country's major exports, but also act as a natural barrier to calamities such as floods and tsunamis.
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Dawn, Pakistan, Monday, 13 Jul, 2009
SO rapid is the rate of degradation that slow poisoning may no longer be an accurate description. As speakers at a workshop pointed out last week, irrational use of chemicals in both rural and urban settings is killing the environment as well as the people of Pakistan. Agriculture is a major culprit, with run-off from farms that rely heavily on chemical fertilisers and pesticides polluting waterways and contaminating groundwater aquifers. Polluted water not only harms human health and biodiversity but also affects agricultural productivity — which, ironically, is what pesticides and other chemicals are meant to boost. Pesticides comprise an overwhelming majority of deadly toxins classified as ‘persistent organic pollutants’, which accumulate in body tissue over time. Despite international restrictions, some of these pesticides are still used in Pakistan and have entered the food chain.
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Daily Times, Tuesday, June 16, 2009
COMMENT: Ayeda Naqvi
Armed with shovels and garbage bags as they swept the streets of Lahore, these young Pakistanis braved the June heat — more than 38 degrees in the shade — as they sought to bring about tangible change
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Dawn, Pakistan
Sunday, 07 Jun, 2009

WITH Pakistan being chosen by the United Nations Environment Programme as the venue of regional celebrations on the occasion of World Environment Day, various awareness-raising events are being organised in Islamabad. One of note was supposed to have been the tree-plantation ceremony, which unfortunately has been cancelled because of bad weather. Nevertheless, planting saplings in spring has become a common activity over the years, and has interested people from all walks of life. Tree-planting efforts are in line not only with UNEP’s Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign but also with other related UN instruments like the 1992 Rio Forest Principles, the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, and the Millennium Development Goals on environmental sustainability. Despite a number of national forest policies since the first forest policy was drawn up in the 1950s, our forests have continued to disappear. According to UN statistics, Pakistan’s forest area decreased from 2,527,000 hectares in 1990 to 1,902,000 hectares in 2005, the latter figure representing 2.5 per cent of the land area of Pakistan. This puts us in the category of countries with low forest cover — under 10 per cent of the total land area.