WASHINGTON, Aug 25 (APP):A leading American newspaper has devoted a full page to highlight Pakistan’s “ambitious” mission to plant 10 billion trees to fight global warming, with 13 photographs to show the huge amount of work being done and its results.
In a write-up with the photos of greening Pakistan, Tik Root, who covers climate change for ‘The Washington Post’, said that the drive was part of an effort that started in 2015, when Imran Khan — then an opposition leader and now the country’s prime minister — backed a programme dubbed a “Billion Tree Tsunami.”
The initiative reached its Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s province-wide target in 2018 and was so successful that the Prime Minister Khan’s government expanded the drive nationally in 2019 with a new goal of 10 billion trees — or, the “Ten Billion Tree Tsunami.”
“Everyone is waking up and starting to plant,” lawyer and environmentalist Hazrat Maaz told The Washington Post at the time.
The programme addresses Pakistan’s history of deforestation as the country confronts the realities of climate change in the form of hotter temperatures, melting Himalayan glaciers and intensifying monsoon rains.
“It makes us very vulnerable,” Malik Amin Aslam, federal minister for climate change, said in a recent phone call with the Post. He has overseen both the provincial and national planting campaigns. “The cheapest, most effective and quickest way to fight climate change is to plant trees,” he said.
Direct planting, the minister explained, accounts for about 40 percent of the programme’s new trees. Hundreds of thousands of people across Pakistan are working to nurture and plant 21 species, from the ‘chir pine’ to the ‘deodar’ — the national tree.
The other 60 percent come from assisted regeneration, in which community members are paid to protect existing forests so that trees can propagate and thrive. Protectors are known as “nighabaan,” and 11 individuals lost their lives fighting the “timber mafia” between 2016 and 2018, according to Malik Amin Aslam.
Whether planted or protected, trees capture and hold carbon dioxide — a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change — and combat erosion on steep landscapes in Pakistan that the minister says are “almost like living on a slide.”
The latest tree “tsunami” appears to be on pace, the Post said.
The rate of new trees has gone up tenfold since the initiative began, Malik Amin Aslam said. He expects another 500 million trees by the end of this year, with a goal of around 3.2 billion by 2023. If the Pakistan Tehreek-Insaf is reelected, the aim is to hit 10 billion trees by 2028.
“Young people get very excited when they hear about this,” he said. “It’s their future that we’re investing in.”
