PESHAWAR, March 11: Conservation of natural resources and putting a halt on environmental degradation are top priority areas of the government, says NWFP Governor Lt-Gen (retired) Syed Iftikhar Hussain Shah.

He said this while speaking as the chief guest at the inaugural ceremony of the three-day international conference on 'Environmental Challenges in the New Millennium', organised by the Peshawar University's Department of Environmental Studies here on Thursday.

The governor said that deforestation and illegal hunting of wildlife and ecological pollution were serious problems. He stressed the need for effective afforestation strategies, saying that certain trees took centuries to grow but illegal cutting had affected a large part of them.

Focussing on the need for creating public awareness, he said the people should be educated about the benefits of trees and forests. In the past, he said, policies remained restricted to implementation of rules only, adding that mere punitive actions did not yield any positive results. He said that efforts to involve all stakeholders would deliver better results.

Pakistan, he said, was among a few countries which had a national conservation strategy, adding that the Frontier province was the first to prepare its Sarhad Provincial Conservation Strategy in 1997.