President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani have said that the government is fully aware of the fallouts of the challenge posed by forest depletion and attaches high priority to environment protection.
In his separate message on the eve of World Environment Day, President Zardari said under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the government planned to increase forest cover from 5 to 6% by the year 2015, which would bring an additional one million hectares of land area under forest. “I am pleased to see that the PPP government has actively participated in international negotiations on environmental issues and several programmes are underway to implement international agreements”, he said.
He said the day was a wake-up call for the world community to realise that land and water resources were under acute threat of degradation and badly impacting life of all living creatures including human beings. “Climate Change is posing a major threat to our economy and existence, and this is largely owed to carbon emissions in industrialised counties.”
Prime Minister Gilani in his message said the world community had recognised immense importance of forests as a global environmental agenda four decades ago, but practical measures to protect and develop global forests were not up to the mark. Although federal and provincial governments had made tremendous efforts in forest conservation, yet Pakistan was able to maintain forest cover just at 5% of the country’s land area, he added.
