KARACHI, Nov 30: Pollution is costing Pakistan six per cent of its gross domestic product and about 25,000 people die every year due to it. The worst affected are the children. The situation calls for a greater collaboration between the public and private sectors and creating mass awareness about the hazards of pollution.

Sindh Minister for Environment and Alternative Energy Askari Taqvi said this while addressing the concluding session of a three-day seminar on “Banking on mangroves: a case for investing in coastal ecosystems” hosted by IUCN Pakistan and the South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics (Sandee).

The day’s proceedings were opened by Javed Jabbar, the IUCN regional counsellor for West Asia.

Mr Taqvi said that awareness about the environmental degradation had come very late to Pakistan, and the Environmental Protection Act was only passed in 1997. Citing a 2006 World Bank study, he said that Pakistan was losing six per cent of its GDP and about 25,000 people were dying every year due to pollution. The worst affected were the children.

The minister admitted that coastal communities had suffered tremendously from mangroves’ depletion. He assured the gathering of government assistance for any project for the rehabilitation of mangroves.

He also referred to the precondition set by the ministry which had made it mandatory for a developer to plant five mangrove trees in lieu of each destroyed tree.

Lamenting the fact that fish was no longer Pakistan’s second largest export, Dr Hafeez Pasha, a developmental economist, stressed the need for policymakers to focus on the value of mangroves not just in terms of their economic gains but also from the perspective of natural disaster protection.

“It is necessary for politicians to address the critical issue of the reduction of freshwater release down toward the mangroves. In view of the multi-sectoral nature of the challenge, the creation of a mangroves rehabilitation and development authority, to serve as a conduit for all related matters, could be helpful,” he said.

Shahid Khan, the CEO of Indus Earth, spoke about the attitude of most land dwellers and said that only those who lived along the sea knew its value and felt for its problems.

“The concentration of policy is on land and agriculture, and very little attention is being paid to the sea and its resources. This lack of interest translates into broader measures that negatively impact our natural resources,” he remarked.

Criticising the government, Mohammed Ali Shah, the chairperson of Fisherfolk Forum, said that neglect and myopic government policies had put the livelihood of millions of fishermen at stake. He said that ecotourism was a threat to fishermen and lamented that efforts of NGOs and environmentalists had largely been proved fruitless and the area under mangroves cover had further decreased.

He accused the DHA of displacing fishermen’s communities in the name of development while blaming agencies like the KPT and the Port Qasim for maltreating fishermen’s communities.

Fred Smiet of the Royal Netherlands Embassy stressed the need for a single agency with whom a donor can interact.

He underscored the importance of coastal zone management and the assistance to communities living in coastal areas through employment generation and protection methods through the preservation of mangroves.

He pointed out that this was also an issue of rights — right to use land and marine resources — and if these were not in place, then work needed to be done in this direction.

Shahid Amjad, the dean Faculty of Marine Sciences, Lasbela University of Agriculture, Masood Lohar of UNDP, and Khalid Rehman, managing director of Pakistan Petroleum Ltd also spoke.