KOHAT, July 14: Oblivious to the adverse effects of climate change and growing environmental pollution, authorities are cutting hundreds of over a century old trees ruthlessly to widen the Kohat-Thall Road.

Also, the famous guava fruit orchards spread over thousands of acres in Kohat city and its nearby villages are gradually vanishing to give way to a more profitable commercial plazas and residential colonies.

However, it seems there is no authority or department at the provincial or local level to plan and discourage such environmentally hazardous trends.

The once salubrious and green Kohat city now presents a look of a barren area where the construction of bypasses on Hangu and Bannu roads and the Kohat-Thall road project have encouraged the owners to cut guava trees on the fertile land along these roads and raise concrete buildings.

The local people and passengers passing through the city have thus been deprived of precious shadow of these trees, which provided them cool environment for decades.

The administration and the elected representatives usually issue statements concerning the road projects for political gains, but nobody had ever announced to plant trees on both sides of the roads.

The Kohat division administration often calls meetings of several departments and the officials visit the projects to stress their early completion. But they rarely called the officials of forest department, which had planted numerous trees in the plantation campaigns during last two decades, to pay attention to the affected parts of Kohat.

The construction of new roads was also resulting in increasing price of land in surrounding areas of Kohat where due to the presence of thick guava orchards the temperature remains bearable even in the hot summer.

The price of the guava fruit, which would be available for Rs20 per kg not long ago, had now gone up to Rs120 per kg due to dwindling orchards. There were times when the orchard owners would gave the fruit free of cost to visitors, but now that symbolic courtesy had died down due to the blind race for money making.

The country which spends millions of rupees on importing guava juice from foreign countries had never thought over a plan to also make it a value-added product, which could stop the cutting of guava orchards.

The government should realise the disastrous implications of the cutting of trees on the roadsides and destruction of the guava orchards to thwart the dangerous effects of climate change.

The only hope on which the people of southern districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were surviving for the last two decades was the construction of Kalabagh Dam, which would have raised the water table and also provided for irrigation o millions of acres of barren land.

This is the third consecutive year that the area has been facing drought-like situation and the traditional well system had started going dry frequently due to lowering water table. In such a situation, it is time for the government and local officials to take some specific steps to save the greenery of the area and ensure provision of sufficient water to save agricultural lands from going barren.