Fifty-year-old Zarmina* has been suffering from rheumatism for the last several years, making her mobility extremely difficult and painful. She lives in Shamshaki, a village in Karak, a southern district of the northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP).

Despite her age and health, she wakes up in the wee hours every day, often when all her co-villagers are asleep, to fetch water on donkeyback from the well that is two kilometres away.

Zarmina tries to complete this task before the sun rises above the horizon, with one reason being it’s a conservative and tribal society. More importantly, though, if she gets late, it could take hours for her turn to fill the two jerry cans, of 40 litres each. 

Each morning, it is a race among the village people to reach the well as early as possible, and it usually takes Zarmina 90 minutes to complete the roundtrip. Some of the villagers have small domestic ponds, roughly around 20 square feet, where they store rainwater for animals, and to wash and clean. 

Until a decade ago, this wasn’t the case, says Muhammad Sohail, another villager. “We would fetch water from running streams and wells, which have since dried up,” he tells Eos. 

Rising temperatures, forest fires and unpredictable weather events have reduced the once verdant Shamshaki valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Karak district to a shadow of its past, with villagers migrating out in large numbers…

A community organisation even tried installing a tubewell, going down to 500 feet, but water was not available, adds Sohail. 

CHANGING LANDSCAPES

Shamshaki was once a lush green valley, surrounded by wild olive jungles, orchards of peach, plums, apple and citrus. Now, only a handful can be found. Two decades ago, nobody could have imagined that the lush green fields — where once wheat, barley, maize and watermelons grew — would turn barren.

It also resulted in an exodus, with only 500 or so villagers now left in Shamshaki, with the majority of its 3,000 inhabitants forced to move elsewhere. 

This is despite the three tehsils, or sub-districts, of Karak being rich in minerals. The rugged barren hillocks and mounds of tehsils Banda Dawood Shah and Karak are rich in oil, gas, gypsum and salt. Tehsil Takht-i-Nasrati is mostly a desert, with high temperatures and huge uranium reserves.

The villagers have their own stories and myths about how their fertile lands were rendered useless. Some of them blame the excavation of oil and gas and other minerals for the weather in their area soaring to unbearable degrees. Others blame the increased installation and use of solar panels. One recurring reason that villagers cite is the excessive deforestation, which has considerably changed the average temperature and rainfall ratio. 

While the story seems to repeat in every second village in the region, the situation is dire in Karak district which, unlike the rest of the southern districts in KP, does not border any river or water reservoir. 

Karak town doesn’t have a water supply, and its roughly 55,000 inhabitants are dependent on water tankers to meet their drinking and other needs. Meanwhile, the groundwater that is available has been declared unfit for drinking, because of the presence of multiple salt minerals, according to Dr Muhammad Nafees, an environmentalist at the University of Peshawar

Syed Kaleem, an expert with the provincial environment protection agency, tells Eos that the materials used in digging and oil extraction have a direct impact on the environment and the processes cause air pollution which, in turn, causes a depletion of the ozone layer, and the resultant rise in temperature. 

There are at least four oil and gas exploration sites in Karak, with more in the adjacent districts of Kohat, Hangu and Mianwali, that have made the air quality worse, although there is limited data to quantify the change.

According to a 2012 study by Dr Samreen Baber, a doctoral researcher, the round-the-clock use of gas furnaces increases the local temperature, with the data suggesting that KP witnessed between 0.3 degree Celsius to 1.2 degree Celsius rise in temperatures in the 30 years till 2010. 

Worsening the problem is the lack of rain, with data from the regional office of the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) in Peshawar showing extremely unpredictable weather patterns over the last two decades. 

COMPOUNDING CRISES

The change in temperature has resulted in multiple challenges for the locals, who have seen their crop yields go down drastically, while others have started to migrate. 

“Until a few years ago, we would grow wheat, which would meet our requirements for the whole year,” says Kamran, a schoolteacher in Shamshaki village. “Now, we are lucky to get even a quarter of that,” he tells Eos. It has also impacted cattle breeding; the low precipitation and brutal deforestation has resulted in green pastures turning barren, continues Kamran.

At the same time, there has been an increase in skin-related complications, including a high incidence of cancer cases, including in areas around the uranium extraction plant in Tehsil Takht-i-Nasrati, according to local doctors. 

Dr Kashif Kamal is a skin specialist from Karak who currently works at the Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar, but visits his hometown every weekend, where he also runs a small clinic. He says most cases of skin-related complications and chest allergies are scattered around areas where exploration and mining is taking place. 

WHITHER AFFORESTATION? 

The ‘Billion Tree Tsunami’ project, launched by the KP government in 2014, and expanded to the national ‘Ten Billion Tree Tsunami’ project by the federal government in 2019, envisioned afforestation of at least 3,000 hectares of land in Karak.

However, the residents of Shamshaki and adjacent villages say they have not witnessed any changes. “Instead, deforestation is on the rise,” says Shamshaki resident Fahim Uddin.   

Two major threats to afforestation are forest fires and the ‘timber mafia’, a loose term referring to various groups and individuals involved in the illegal cutting and transportation of trees. 

The Billion Tree project also hired ‘nigahbaans’ or ‘protectors’, locals who were paid an amount to protect the forests. During 2016-18, at least 11 nigahbaans were killed in clashes with members of the ‘timber mafia.’

Locals say such criminal elements remain active and thriving, oftentimes with the collusion of authorities. 

Salar, another resident of Shamshaki, tells Eos that the families leaving the village often sell their share of the jungle land to these unscrupulous elements. “In one case, the forest of a whole sub-tribe was sold off to them,” he adds.

In the past, there used to be a village committee to oversee the collective forests of different clans. A member from every clan was part of the committee and, if anybody was found guilty of stealing timber, he was punished, charged financially and handed over to the police. “But with the rise of the mafia and the migration of the locals, the committee is no longer functional.”

Karak tehsil mayor Azmat Khattak says that he wants to conserve the forest, but has little to offer in terms of solution except a complete ban on deforestation and timber transport. 

Meanwhile, the threat of wildfires remains, with the area suffering from it in summers and in winters as well, when the bushes are dry. This past April, a massive fire engulfed the rainforest in the Shamshaki valley, and hundreds of hectares of wild olive trees were incinerated within 48 hours.

Dr Nafees, the environmentalist at the University of Peshawar, says deforestation is a key reason for the rise in temperature, which also decreases the annual ratio of rainfall. “Forests are the lungs of nature and they absorb carbon dioxide gas,” he tells Eos. “When the green surface is eroded, less carbon dioxide is absorbed and [the ground] also traps heat energy from sun rays. Hence, the overall temperature of a locality is increased,” he explains. 

Recently, the southern parts of KP experienced an extreme heatwave, followed by an unexpected late winter snow spell in Karak. Climate expert Syed Kaleem warns that locals will now increasingly deal with uncertain patterns of weather. 

The situation is grim and challenging, and yet another reminder that nature deserves its due.g

** Name changed to protect identity*

The writer is an MPhil scholar interested in climate change and the environment. He can be contacted at hussainalikhattak@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 4th, 2024