OF all the battles that Imran Khan has waged, the campaign against KP’s timber mafia is the most crucial.

Given the tense political clime, the PTI chief could have indulged in one of his frequent verbal assaults against Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and the Panama Papers at the Pakistan Forest Institute in Peshawar on Monday.

After all, the relentless spotlight on the offshore accounts of Mr Sharif’s family has put the prime minister on the back foot, leading him to deliver two national addresses on state TV.

Thankfully, Mr Khan only marginally touched on the controversy engulfing Mr Sharif, preferring to use the occasion to draw attention to a critical ecological issue: the depletion of the country’s forest cover and his party’s efforts against the timber mafia in the PTI-ruled province.

To its credit, the PTI is, so far, the only major party to have raised environmental issues at the national level.

The matter does not only concern trees and general greenery. In a period where climate-related disasters are striking the country harder and faster than ever before, it is strange that minimal attention is paid to the country’s ecology. There is simply no interest in conserving the natural environment, and certainly no debate on the subject.

Trees and forest cover are not just about beautifying the landscape. The absence of tree cover in Karachi, for instance, contributed significantly to the large number of fatalities caused by last year’s heatwave.

Trees play a vital role in safeguarding biodiversity, protecting hills from landslides and preventing water logging of irrigated land, and are considered ‘lungs of the planet’.

Pakistan’s forest cover is depleting fast, and the Ministry of Climate Change, which is supposed to oversee the annual tree plantation drives planned by the federal government around the monsoon season, cuts a very sorry figure before this reality.

Nor is the timber mafia just a collection of ragtag lumberjacks. They were known to be important financiers supporting the Swat Taliban, and remain a vast and totally unaccountable group devouring the country’s natural resource heritage like termites.

In KP, their strength is comparable to that of land grabbers. Mr Khan was right to flag this issue as a critical one for future generations and to try and inspire the fresh crop of future forestry officers, whose graduation ceremony he was addressing, to rise to the challenge before them.

Replacing the lost forest cover and fighting against those who demolish it is not an easy task.

It is a long battle that demands courage from the group of young officers if they are to stand up to the rapaciousness of the timber mafia.

It is about time that all our politicians recognised the grave implications of deforestation and took concerted action to stop practices that destroy the natural environment.

Published in Dawn, April 27th, 2016