PESHAWAR, Feb 22: Environmental experts and senior officials of various departments of the NWFP government have said the province is faced with a serious threat of environmental degradation, and stressed the need for a “righteous approach” to avoid any natural catastrophe.

They made this observation at a consultative workshop, held here on Tuesday and jointly organized by the United Naitons Development Programme, the NWFP Planning and Development Department and IUCN-Sarhad Office on “Security Implications of A Fragile Environment”.

It was the second of a series of nine workshops to be held in different cities of the country to prepare recommendations for the coming world summit on sustainable development. The summit will held from Aug 24 to Sep 4 at Johannesburg, South Africa.

The workshop was also aimed at generating a broad-based consensus for the preparation of a strategic framework for sustainable development in the country for the next 20-25 years, a poverty reduction strategy, a national environmental action plan and policies on water and forestry.

Expressing apprehensions about the fast degrading environmental conditions and the threat to the natural resources of the NWFP, in particular, and the rest of the country, in general, Sahibzada Anees, additional secretary for planning and development, said the province needed concerted efforts to avoid any major disaster.

Yousuf Khan, the director-general of the community infrastructure project, Peshawar, made a presentation on the worldwide expanding concept of security and its linkage with environment.

The speakers remarked that though the province had an explicit regulatory framework, laws, strategies and action plans to check threats to environment and the echo-system, lack of implementation on the laws was rendering useless all the good work done.

“We have had good development plans, strategies, vision, appropriate action plans and trained manpower but it is the poor implementation which jeopardized all the good initiatives taken to prevent environment from degradation”, said the provincial minister for irrigation and power, Shamsul Mulk, who was the chief guest at the workshop.

Talking about the Shah Alam River that passes through   Peshawar and falls into the Kabul River, he said it (Shah Alam River) did not reflect the picture of a river, as heavy discharge of industrial effluents and solid waste products had polluted it to a very great extent.

“We (Peshawarites) are literally sitting on a time bomb because Peshawar city does not have a treatment plant as a result underground water is getting polluted”, the minister said, while expressing his concern about the poor condition of sub-soil water in the city.

Officials of provincial forest, planning and development and environment departments, environmental protection agency and representatives of many public and private organizations participated in the workshop.