July 06, 2007	Friday	Jamadi-us-Sani 20, 1428

ISLAMABAD, July 5: As the Lal Masjid standoff continues, the environment ministry officials keep their fingers crossed — whether they would be able to retrieve something from their gutted offices or have to restart from square one.

The ministry of environment was completely burnt down on the first day, when armed clashes started between students of the Lal Masjid and security forces.

“At present it is absolutely unclear if we can get something out of the building because of the ongoing curfew in the area,” Director General Environment Javed Hassan Aly said when contacted.

However, he said, the television channels clearly showed the entire building was ransacked before setting it on fire, therefore, “I don’t think there would be anything left which could help us. It would be a serious blow to the ministry’s efforts.”

Interestingly, the ministry, housed in a portion of the old naval headquarters, had been lavishly decorated by its new minister Makhdoom Faisal Saleh Hayat, who swapped his portfolio of Kashmir affairs with Tahir Iqbal during the last cabinet reshuffling.

Of late, the ministry had launched a number of important projects to improve the country’s environmental situation. However, with all its record and state of the art equipment reduced to ashes, it seems the ministry would need some serious efforts before it could start functioning again.

The Rs40 million Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) was initiated under the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in order to explore cost-effective options to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

A CDM cell was established in August 2005 to support the Designated National Authority (DNA) in technical matters, including CDM strategy and policy formulation, awareness raising activities for the CDM, enhancement of capacity and review of CDM projects for approval by the DNA.

It was one of the important projects that helped the developing countries in achieving sustainable development goal, while at the same time contributing to the ultimate objective of the UNFCCC.

It aimed at assisting the developing countries to implement project activities that reduce greenhouse gases emissions.

There were scores of other projects which the ministry was under taking currently. In the renewable and alternate energy section, the ministry was working on energy efficiency and conservation, fossil fuel cogeneration, gas flaring and recycling. In the field of waste management, the experts were working on landfill gas capture, recycling and composing, and energy from solid waste.

To improve the transportation system, environmentalists were working on alternative vehicles such as CNG buses and bio-diesel, mass transit systems and cleaner engines. Work was also being done to improve industrial processes in the field of sugar, cement, fertiliser, textile, paper and steel bricks.