Green Pakistan Programme To Boost Forest Cover: Ministry

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Green Pakistan Programme to boost forest cover: Ministry

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Jan, 2017 ) : The ministry for Climate Change Monday expressed confidence that the Green Pakistan Programme (GPP) would help control deforestation and boost forest cover.

DIG Forest Abdul Munaf QaimKhani said,"On the directive of Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif four projects have been launched under Green Pakistan programme to control deforestation". He told APP, Tree plantation campaign was the first step to control deforestation, in this campaign Mass scale forestation was focused and Ministry launched plantation campaign in public schools of Islamabad to involve and motivate young generation and create awareness among them regarding plantation.

Second project was `Survival of Forest Resources in Pakistan," An amount of 3.625 Rs billion is alraedy approved for the project in November by CDWP and now that project is in ECNEC and we are hoping that project would be approved in next meeting, DIG Forest said.

Besides this, there were the on-going programmes in provinces under climate ministry Given the fact that not only formal consent but also 50% financial share of provincial governments was a pre-requisite to formulation and processing of an umbrella project for accessing the funds allocated for the programme in the Federal PSDP.

The federal Minister for Climate Change wrote anticipatory letters to the Chief Ministers of the provinces, Governor Khyber Pakhtunkhwa(for the FATA) & Prime Minister AJK in June 2016 to request preparation of PC-Is and provision of equal financial share for the programme.

The last was REDD plus (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) international programme in which they trained how to contral deforestation with the contribution of local communities.

The people of that areas were aslso trained to save tress so that they can stock carbon and cell that carbon in international market. Ministry is working closely with REDD to achieve this task which falls under PM's Green Pakistan Programme (GPP).

DIG Forest Dr Raja Muhammad Omer told APP,"Ongoing project under world bank aimed to bring all forest departments and of provinces, forest related communities and corporate sector on one platform for training and capacity building." Ministry of Climate Change with support of UNDP has approved a project `Sustainable Forest Management' by Global Environment Facility (GEF), he added.

5.01% land area is covered under forest in Pakistan. There are 55 forest poor countries in the world unfortunately Pakistan is one of them. These countries are called law forest counties (LFC).Only 30 % of land of earth planet is under forest and this is just a myth that 25 should be covered under forest.

Under Millennium Development Goals (MDG) we had set the target to increase the land area under forest to 6 %., he said.