What Islamabad's tree felling reveals about climate governance

There are cities you pass through, and then there are cities you feel yourself becoming part of. Islamabad was always the latter for me. Driving through its wide avenues, the city did not simply exist around you, it moved with you. The trees curved over the roads, filtered the light, softened the sound. Islamabad's beauty was never ornamental; it was ecological. You felt alive in it, connected to it, held by it.

But beauty is not infinite. Especially not under accelerating climate stress, poor planning and institutional neglect.

The Official Story – Health, Courts and the Chainsaw: In recent months, that fragility has become impossible to ignore. Large swathes of trees across Islamabad have been felled by CDA, officially justified as a public health intervention. Authorities maintain that the operation targeted paper mulberry, an invasive species long associated with seasonal pollen allergies and respiratory distress in the capital, and that removals were conducted under court-related directives, with assurances that replacement planting would offset the loss.

It is important to be clear from the outset: paper mulberry is a public health concern. Seasonal allergies and respiratory distress are real, and public health cannot be dismissed or minimised. But acknowledging a health risk is not the same as addressing it well. The problem here is not that public health was invoked. The problem is how it was invoked, and what was missing from that approach.

Public health policy is not meant to operate through blunt instruments. It requires evidence, proportionality, transparency and long-term risk assessment. Yet what was notably absent from this intervention were publicly accessible ecological assessments, clear species inventories and health impact analyses that weighed pollen reduction against the loss of mature canopy, carbon storage, urban cooling and air filtration. Health was framed as an emergency justification, but treated as a short-term fix.

Almost immediately, citizens, environmental groups and petitioners began asking whether all felled trees were indeed paper mulberry, why removals extended beyond expected zones, and why ecological data was not disclosed. The Islamabad High Court's intervention underscored what many already sensed: this was no longer a routine administrative exercise. It had become a governance failure demanding scrutiny.

Who Governs the Trees? At the heart of this failure lies a deeply murky governance structure. The CDA operates under the Ministry of Interior, an institution primarily responsible for security and administrative control, not climate resilience, ecological planning or public health integration. This raises an obvious question: where was the Ministry of Climate Change and Environmental Coordination? What role did it play, if any, in assessing ecological impacts, aligning decisions with national climate commitments, or ensuring that environmental governance standards were met?

Pakistan does, on paper, have a climate governance architecture. The National Climate Change Policy (2021) calls explicitly for inter-ministerial coordination, integration of climate policy across sectors and coherent decision-making between federal, provincial and local authorities. The Pakistan Climate Change Act establishes councils and authorities meant to guide and oversee climate action. Yet in practice, urban environmental decisions are still treated as administrative matters rather than climate actions with national consequences. The CDA cuts trees. The Interior Ministry oversees the CDA. The climate ministry issues policies. The environmental agencies react after the fact.

Trees as Infrastructure, Not Decoration: Pakistan's own National Climate Change Policy recognises forests and tree cover as critical to climate adaptation and mitigation, an especially urgent recognition in a country where forest cover stands at roughly 5.45%. In such a context, the loss of mature urban trees is consequential. Similarly, Pakistan's Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC 3.0), submitted under the Paris Agreement, places land use and forestry at the centre of both mitigation and adaptation strategies. It emphasises transparency, monitoring and evidence-based implementation. Yet Islamabad's experience suggests a troubling disconnect between national climate commitments and local execution.

What we are witnessing is a persistent "fast forestry" mindset – rapid plantation without ecological foresight, followed by rapid removal when consequences emerge. This cycle satisfies short-term political and administrative pressures but undermines long-term climate resilience. When policy is reduced to numbers what disappears is time. A sapling cannot replace the ecosystem services of a decades-old tree for generations.

The uncertainty around species identification only deepens the concern. If all felled trees were paper mulberry, transparent inventories and public ecological assessments should have strengthened confidence. In climate governance, uncertainty is not a technical flaw, it erodes legitimacy. Pakistan's own climate documents acknowledge persistent weaknesses in environmental data and monitoring. Islamabad has become a living example of what happens when those weaknesses meet irreversible decisions.

The deeper issue extends beyond mulberry. Paper mulberry was introduced decades ago because it was fast-growing, visually appealing and convenient. Its long-term health and ecological impacts were not fully understood at the time. Today, we are paying the price of that decision. And this raises an uncomfortable question: what is stopping us from repeating the same mistake with other species?

Without research and development, without species-level risk assessments, without coordination between urban planners, ecologists, public health experts, and climate institutions, today's "beautiful" plantation could become tomorrow's health or climate liability. Invasive species do not announce themselves immediately. Their impacts unfold slowly. Cutting trees after the fact is not prevention. It is damage control.

A Forward Looking Approach: Effective public health policy is preventive, integrated and long-term. Cutting trees without publicly available ecological assessments and cross-ministerial climate coordination is not decisive governance; it is reactive governance. There is, however, a way forward. Pakistan's NDC 3.0 highlights a defining demographic reality: a large youth population that is both a pressure point and a profound opportunity.

Urban forestry could become a space for building climate capacity, training young people in species identification, ecological monitoring, GIS mapping and community data collection. This would strengthen transparency, improve data quality and invest in the human capital required for long-term resilience.

Islamabad's trees once made the city feel alive. Bad planning, opaque governance and institutional silos risk making it unlivable. This is not a sentimental argument. It is a policy one. In a climate-vulnerable country, every urban tree decision is already a climate decision. The only question is whether we will continue making them as if they are not.