Environmental concerns: In the absence of federal laws, MDG likely to be missed

Schemes initiated by provinces which may result in deforestation are outside federal purview.

ISLAMABAD:

Pakistan has forests over only 2.5 to four per cent of its total area, according to different estimates. But with an annual deforestation rate of around 2 per cent, the country is also likely to miss the Millennium Development Goal of increasing its forest cover to six per cent by 2015.

In the 1970s, Pakistan and India came up with needs-based forest policies that turned out to be quite effective in tackling deforestation.

The 1975 forest policy devised by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government separated forest harvesting from forest management, clipping the wings of contractors and empowering local communities which own the forests in some parts of the country. At the time, the felling and sale of trees in Pakistan was left to contractors. In the absence of checks and balances, they overshot the quota they had bid for in open auctions.

Across the border, around the same time, India included forestry in its concurrent list, a list of issues on which both the federal and provincial governments are authorised to legislate, with precedence given to federal laws. This led to a federal law which established afforestation funds and eventually reduced conversion of forest area for non-forest use in India by 90 per cent over 30 years.



The federal government’s ability to enact legislation for protecting and improving forest area was a point of departure for the two forest policies. A point which environmentalists believe has created a dilemma for Pakistan. Forestry was a provincial subject even before the 18th Amendment and since 2010, jurisdictional issues surrounding forests could prevent the country from delivering on its international commitments.

Schemes like the Zulfikarabad city project — with the mandate to convert the land use of Thatta district, home to 90 per cent of Pakistan’s mangrove forests — are outside the federal purview. Similarly, the ban on timber movement from district Diamer was lifted recently, attracting criticism from environmentalists who fear it would increase the pace of illegal logging.



Pakistan is a party to the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Plus (REDD+) initiative, which offers to pay cash to developing countries for the carbon stored in their forests. Forests store up to 45 per cent of the world’s carbon dioxide and are important in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.

The country is required to have national entities for monitoring forests and preventing deforestation to qualify for these benefits. The Ministry of Climate Change could fit the bill. However, it is the provinces which control logging and movement of timber.

According to the Punjab Forest Act, 2010, the Punjab government can set the route through which timber “may be imported, exported or removed into or from Pakistan across any customs frontier as defined by the (Punjab) Government.” Baqir said this provision is problematic because it allows legally and illegally cut timber to make its way in and out of Punjab, without any care for the overall impact on the country’s forest cover.

Even though forestry was not on Pakistan’s concurrent list before devolution, the now-defunct Ministry of Environment had been supporting forestry mega projects in the provinces worth Rs12 billion. The funds were cut when the ministry was dissolved.

Moreover, contractors, who made a comeback in the 1980s through bureaucratic loopholes, have now morphed into powerful timber mafias, operating with the patronage of influential locals and politicians and the collusion of forest officials.

“Deforestation in Gilgit-Baltistan, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Azad Jammu and Kashmir is linked to the huge domestic market for timber in Lahore and Karachi,” Fayyaz Baqir, director of the Akhtar Hameed Khan Resource Centre said at a meeting of the Senate Standing Committee on Climate Change in April.

One recommendation from environmentalists is to enforce a law to penalise violators for logging and construction in an area declared a forest reserve.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 12^th, 2013.