KARACHI, June 16: The World Desertification Day is being observed in the country, like everywhere else around the globe, on Tuesday.
The theme of the day for this year is “Water Resource Management and Desertification,” which was selected to support the International Year of the Freshwater.
The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has been focussing the countries, which are experiencing serious drought. The UNCCD was signed by Pakistan at a meeting held in Paris in 1994.
Since, the UNCCD is a legally binding treaty and countries have to ratify it through parliamentary approval, Pakistan ratified it in 1997 and became a party to the convention.
To implement the convention, every member country needs to develop a National Action Plan (NAP) and has to establish a National Desertification Fund (NDF). Pakistan started working on the NAP in 1994 through a UN Environment Programme grant, but wider consultation with the stake-holders, particularly with the non-governmental organizations was not done.
The deadline for the Asian countries to develop their NAPs is the year 2005. The UNCCD secretariat has been repeatedly requesting all the countries, which signed the convention, for an early formulation of the NAP and its subsequent approval from the Cabinet.
The government’s lack of interest in this regard is evident from the fact that a junior deputy secretary level ministry official was sent to attend the five-day ministerial conference held at Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates) that concluded on June 11.
Desertification and drought are inextricably linked to the areas with finite resources of water. Water is critical for sustenance, ecological balance and it is an indispensable resource for social and economic development. Thus, in order to fight both poverty and desertification, sustainable water resource management is imperative.
Land degradation in reverse affects water resources by reducing its availability and quality while it also alters the flows of rivers and streams, which may lead to flooding, groundwater depletion, water pollution and salinization.
Due to land degradation, the arable land per person is declining from 0.32 hectares per person in 1961-63 to 0.21 hectares in 1997-99 globally. Considering the ratio, the arable land per person is expected to drop further to 0.16 hectares by the year 2030, posing a serious threat to food security.
In Pakistan, the concept of UNCCD is very much applicable to the deteriorated conditions of land. The country possesses substantial dryland areas as well as deserts and the process of desertification here is deteriorating lands due to a number of reasons. Over 52 per cent area of Pakistan is characterized to be arid, semi arid and sub humid.
Some of the main reasons catalysing the process of desertification are heavy soil erosion caused by deforestation in northern mountainous area. This is also resulting in the fast silting up of the water reservoirs of Tarbella and Mangla.
