Federal Minister for Climate Change, Zahid Hamid, stressed the need for exploiting massive Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) potential to address the country’s shrinking forest cover by large-scale forestation.
“The country corporate sector should divert a significant chunk of the CSR funds to strengthen the country’s ailing forestry sector, so that they can fight socio-economic impacts of global warming-induced climate change,” he said.
Chairing a high-level meeting on `Promoting Afforestation Campaign through CSR in Pakistan’ on Sunday he said, CSR representatives of automobile, telecommunication, petroleum, banking, industry and top key provincial forest department officials attended the meeting.
Talking about the Prime Minister’s Green Pakistan Programme (GPP), the minister informed the meeting that the prime minister is serious about boosting the country’s tree cover by all possible means.
“In this regard, he has directed the climate change ministry to proactively engage all provincial forest departments, corporate sector, non-governmental organizations and other provincial and federal government departments, ministries to actualize the Green Pakistan Programme, launched last month by the prime minister,” he highlighted.
A five-year target of 100 million tree plantation across the country between 2016, 2021 has been set as part of efforts to cope with the devastating impacts of climate change, particularly floods.
“No country can achieve climate resilience as long as the forestry sector is not assigned as top priority as part of the climate forward action,” Zahid Hamid stated.