‘Billion tree tsunami’ surges across KP

islamabad — One of Pakistan’s greenest provinces is becoming greener still: In just a year it has added three-quarters of a billion new trees, as part of a ‘tree tsunami’ aimed at reversing worsening forest loss.

“The success on the ground is phenomenal. This is not just about planting trees but about changing attitudes,” said Rab Nawaz, senior director of programmes for WWFPakistan, which has helped audit the tree-planting effort.

The ‘Billion Tree Tsunami’, which involves adding trees both by planting and natural regeneration, is backed by cricketing legend Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreeki-Insaf (PTI) party, which governs in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, in Pakistan’s northwest. It aims to turn around deforestation and increase the province’s forested area by at least 2 per cent.

Years of tree felling have reduced Pakistan’s forests to under 2 per cent of its land area, one of the lowest levels in the region, according to a 2015 UN Food and Agriculture Organisation report.

About 40 per cent of the country’s remaining forests are in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, where Khan’s tree planting effort is expected to hit its billion-tree goal by the end of 2017.

In preparation for the reforestation effort, the provincial government helped set up a network of tree nurseries across the province in 2016, providing loans and purchase agreements for tree saplings.

Altogether it has spent Rs11 billion ($110 million) on the effort, said Malik Amin Aslam, the chairman of the province’s Green Growth Initiative.

About 13,000 government and private nurseries, in almost every district of the province, are now producing hundreds of thousands of saplings of local and imported tree varieties, including pines, walnuts and eucalyptus, Aslam told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The nurseries have provided about 40 per cent of the new trees in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa; the remaining trees have come from natural regeneration in forests now put under protection, he said.

Many small-scale nurseries, producing up to 25,000 saplings, have been set up with cash advances and a guaranteed purchase agreement from the provincial government.

Such small nurseries can earn incomes of around Rs12,000 to 15,000 ($115-$140) a month, a sizeable income for rural villagers, said Aslam.

An estimated 500,000 “green jobs” have been created through the effort, some of which have gone to rural women and unemployed youth, he said. “People have become aware that forests are KP’s precious resource,” he added. —

the success on the ground is phenomenal. this is not just about planting trees but about changing attitudes Rab Nawaz, WWF-Pakistan official