ABBOTTABAD, Aug 26: The country director of the United Nations Development Programme, Alvaro Rodriguez, has said that the United Nations Environment Project has identified various key areas of concern that need to be addressed for sustainable development in Pakistan.

Speaking at the opening ceremony of a two-day international conference on Environmentally Sustainable Development ‘Esdev-2007’ at the Comsats Institute of Information and Technology here on Sunday, he mentioned population, poverty and inequality, food production and agriculture, clean water and sanitation, biodiversity and forests, energy and air pollution as such areas.

Quoting figures from a study done by the UNDP, he said that Pakistan was suffering from a loss of Rs150 to Rs180 billion due to land degradation while losses suffered due to river silting, floods, landslides and road collapse had not been measured.

More than 100 researchers and scholars from Austria, Bangladesh, China, Germany, Belgium, Indonesia, India, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Malaysia, Norway, New Zealand, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Vietnam, UK and USA and Pakistan are taking part in the conference.

The conference has been divided in eight sectors covering all issues relating to environment.

Talking about the consequences of contaminated water and poor sanitation, Alvaro Rodriguez said that no act of terrorism generated economic devastation on such a big scale alone as one 1.8 million children died each year as a result of unclean water and poor sanitation.

He said that Pakistan accounted for 118,000 of these deaths due to diarrhoea.

Deaths from diarrhoea in 2004 (globally) were about six times greater than the average annual death in all armed conflicts around the world for the decade of 1990s.

The UNDP country chief said that Pakistan, which was once a water surplus country, now faced water shortage in the agriculture sector.

He said that it had been estimated that the country would face 29 per cent water shortage in 2010 and 33 per cent in 2025.He said that Pakistan used a large (40 per cent) of its export earning to import energy.

He said that at present 20 per cent of Pakistanis had access to piped natural gas while others were paying larger percentage of their income towards meeting their domestic energy demands.

“Electricity shortfalls have led to adjust the energy crisis though loadshedding and load management and this are putting negative impact on the industrial and commercial output.”

Prof Mary Hancock of the Oxford Brookes University said that man’s actions were responsible for the climate change and now responsibility rest on the shoulders of the custodian of the earth to look into environmental hazards.

She hoped that this academic collaboration would help local as well as global environment and just like previous ‘Esdev’ conference would also come up with solutions.

Chairman of the organising committee, Professor Raja Iftikhar, briefed the participants about the salient features of the conference.

The director of the Comsats Institute of Information and Technology spoke on the efforts taken by the Comstats towards providing opportunity to researchers and scientists to chalk out a strategy to face the upcoming challenges by Pakistan especially the Northern Areas of the country.