ISLAMABAD, June 2: The Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) has set up a $10 million fund for environment by merging the activities of Bellerive Foundation in AKF.

“The activities of the Bellerive Foundation are being integrated into the Aga Khan Foundation in the form of the ‘Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan Fund for the Environment’, a $10 million fund which will be dedicated to practical solutions to environmental problems”, a press release issued by the AKF here Thursday said.

The Bellerive Foundation was founded by the late Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan in Switzerland in 1977. Its major programmes focused on the link between the scarcity of natural resources and poverty in the developing world, the preservation of fragile mountain ecosystems, animal protection, and initiatives in environmental education.

The new Fund will concentrate its activities in environmental education, natural resource management in fragile zones, nature parks and wildlife reserves, environmentally and culturally appropriate tourism infrastructure, environmental health, and research.

Special focus areas include water resource management in areas of desertification and measures to reduce the vulnerability of the poor to natural disasters. The Fund will also work to alleviate the poverty that forces people to consume the few resources available to them — a cycle that often results in deeper poverty, depleted soils, deforestation, desertification, pollution, water scarcity, disease and hunger.

“Bellerive activities, such as tree conservation and the design of fuelsaving cooking systems, will reinforce AKF’s existing programmes”, the release said.

The Foundation’s present environment-related activities include: rural development projects that have planted over 26 million trees and transformed 33,000 hectares of degraded land into productive use, in Northern Areas of Pakistan; natural resource management in drought-stricken areas of Kenya and India that encompass rainwater harvesting systems, tree planting, conservation education and reservoir construction; and rural water and sanitation projects designed to reduce the prevalence of disease in Afghanistan.

Environmental concerns also cut across the activities of the other eight agencies of the Aga Khan Development Network. Projects range from a hydroelectric plant in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan to appropriate sanitation measures and low-cost filtration techniques for drinking water being developed at Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan.

The University of Central Asia, which will be located on three campuses — in Khorog, Tajikistan; Tekeli, Kazakhstan; and Naryn, Kyrgyz Republic — will incorporate parks that function not only as environmental resources for local communities, but as dynamic laboratories for research and education in a variety of disciplines, including water and dry land management, reforestation, energy substitution and biodiversity.

The late Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, paternal uncle of Prince Karim Aga Khan, was the second son of Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah Aga Khan, who and President of the League of Nations from 1937 to 1939. Prince Sadruddin served the international community in a variety of roles, including the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (1965-77) and the UN Coordinator for Assistance to Afghanistan (1988-90). He was also the UN Executive Delegate of the Secretary General for a humanitarian programme for Iraq, Kuwait, and the Iraq-Iran and Iraq-Turkey border areas (1990).