FOR years, successive tree plantation policies have come up short. Nevertheless, the latest effort to go green comes from the Sindh Forest Department; it has announced the Sindh Sustainable Forest Management Policy (Amended) 2023 — purified of clauses that encouraged ‘agricultural activity’ on “forestland in riverine area”. The scheme takes aim at cultivation, which denudes sizeable expanses of green cover, resulting in sequential devastation and climate crises. Last month, satellite images of Sindh’s riverine forests uncovered a sad 80pc depletion in the province, in places such as Matiari, Surjani, Sadhuja Reserved Forest, etc. Interestingly, the scheme was reported in the same week as news of the timber mafia pulling down trees across Pakistan; it even struck decades-old trees in Hazro near Attock as well as countless eucalyptus trees along the Hazro-Gondal road allegedly in connivance with forest department personnel.

Activists have pointed to the Forest Act 1927 as an alarming statute — rife with ambiguities and in dire need of revision, it provides free rein to mafia crimes. Meanwhile, villagers lament decreased riverside bird variety and habitation and damaged livelihoods as trees provide fodder for bees and their livestock. Collective influence must be brought to bear on authorities to apply plans with urgency and to stamp out environment crimes. Lawmakers, civil society and climate advocates must take the lead in the protection and proliferation of such crucial natural resources. Forests have an integral role in the carbon cycle. When harmed or hacked, carbon absorption isn’t merely disturbed, it ceases and carbon reserves in the felled tree are discharged as CO2 as the wood is either set alight or left to decompose. Finding a way out of a thicket of corruption and complacency is a long road. Any attempt at improving forest cover cannot succeed with impediments like poverty, unemployment and lack of energy alternatives. Pakistan’s trees have to grow beyond paper to thwart disaster.

Published in Dawn, May 30th, 2023