In the words of the famous Sufi poet, Khwaja Ghulam Farid, “Where there are more trees and greenery, there will be more of those who will share our pain and sorrows”. Trees are home to a wide range of birds, animals and plants. Cut down the trees and you destroy the habitat of hundreds of species. Science also teaches us how important trees are in the carbon cycle — in fact, forests are considered to be “carbon sinks” which absorb harmful carbon dioxide and emit oxygen. Yet, forests and trees are being cut all over the country at an alarming rate.

Just take our cities — Rawalpindi’s tree-lined mall road is today just a memory, while Abbotabad’s beautiful old trees are disappearing fast. In Lahore, if it wasn’t for a small band of committed citizens who galvanised the media and civil society, the old trees on Lahore’s canal road would have all been cut down by now (as it is, quite a few were cut to make the under passes on the canal). Our cities are congested with traffic and choked with air pollution — don’t our policy makers realise that it is imperative to save the few precious trees that are remaining and to plant even more? And why aren’t our forest communities doing more to protect their forests, their only precious resource?

Unfortunately, Pakistan’s land mass has the lowest cover of forests in the region. According to the FAO (the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation), Pakistan has a forest area of just 2.2 per cent (1.687 m ha) of which only 20.2 per cent (340k ha) is primary forest. Pakistan is also losing what remains of its forests at the rate of 42,000 ha per year (1.66 per cent). Again, according to the FAO, Pakistan has already lost 840,000 ha or 33.2 per cent of its forest cover between 1990 and 2010. The reality is that our forests are shrinking. Even our dense mangrove forests are depleting on the coast — in 1965 we had 400,000+ ha and by 2000 we were down to about 176,000 or 154,000 ha.

Massive deforestation actually started back in the 1990s and the greatest victims were the conifer forests in the Himalayan belt, resulting in disastrous flooding in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 1992. The late Omar Asghar Khan successfully lobbied the government to place a ban on logging after these disastrous floods, taking on the timber mafia’s ire.

We don’t even have to go back that far to realise the negative impact of deforestation. The massive earthquake that struck Pakistan’s north in 2005 resulted in widespread landsliding in the mountains. The landsliding was a direct result of the deforestation that had taken place in this region and claimed thousands of lives in KPK and Azad Kashmir territory as entire villages were swept away.

Today, local communities continue to be seduced by commercial timber prospects. Trees are cut and sold to contractors who get rich overnight while the forest communities remain impoverished. In recent years, the influx of Afghan refugees into the north of Pakistan has also resulted in an increase in the cutting of trees. As the population grows, so does the demand for fuel wood and the numbers of livestock that graze on young saplings, damaging the forests.

However, there is some good news to report. With the support of community-based organisations and NGOs, many forest communities in the north are gradually becoming aware of the importance of saving their precious natural resources. On the coast, communities are planting mangrove saplings and re-growing these precious forests that protect the coast from storms and provide a rich breeding ground for shrimp, crabs and other fish. What the government needs to do is to develop the political will for conservation and to provide resource allocation for biodiversity.

There is also another way to reverse deforestation with international support. Pakistan has now signed the UN’s REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation with the added component of carbon enhancing) mechanism that was agreed upon at the UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun in 2010. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that deforestation contributes to 20 per cent of green house gases that cause climate change and hence saving forests in the developing world is of crucial importance.

Under the REDD+ system, developing countries that are willing and able to reduce emissions from deforestation are to be financially compensated for doing so. REDD+ also promotes the informed and meaningful involvement of all stakeholders, including indigenous peoples and other forest dependent communities.

In Nepal, REDD+ has shown good results since being implemented two years ago as a pilot project. Payments are made to community forest groups for the forests managed and conserved by local communities. The local people have also been trained to measure the carbon stored by trees in their area. There are efforts now to start REDD+ in Pakistan, specifically in KPK and Azad Kashmir, and introductory workshops have been held by the government’s Forest Department.

Before REDD+ can show results in Pakistan, however, there is a need for legal and institutional reforms in the Forest Department and then the installation of transparent monitoring, reporting and verification to check whether the forest cover has indeed improved. Under REDD+ all forests conserved by communities will become eligible for funding. Perhaps once the local people realise the monetary benefits of conserving their forests, they will finally start saving their trees.