World Environment Day—challenges ahead

Cleaner environment has emerged as an uphill task owing to population increase and depleting resources. The governments, international organizations and communities have been doing their bit to cope with this situation.
But despite these efforts, environmental conservation remains a challenge particularly for the developing countries and the issues like global warming and trans-boundaries pollution still haunt the nations.
The Government on its part has been striving for cleaner environment and better health facilities by focussing on a number of areas. One of the core issue - the clean drinking water is being addressed with installation of more than 6000 clean drinking water filtration plants across the country.
An amount of more than Rs. eight billion is being spent to implement Clean Drinking Water Initiative (CDWI) and Clean Drinking Water for All (CDWA) programs. Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency (Pak-EPA) is executing these programs. The government envisages to provide safe drinking water to every citizen by the end of 2007.
An Environment Policy has been formulated to control environmental degradation and strengthening sectoral institutional capacity, raise environmental awareness, promulgate environmental legislation including National Environment Quality Standards and the establishment of Environment Tribunals.
Various projects have been started under the National Environmental Action Plan - Support Program (NEAP-SP) to protect environment by adopting integrated approach. Initial Environment Examination (IEE) and Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) have been made mandatory for all public sector development projects.
Protection and management of land resources; combating deforestation and drought; sustainable agriculture; conservation of biological diversity; environmentally sound biotechnology management, conservation of wildlife and protecting oceans and the marine life has been the main focus.
Pakistan is a signatory to many international conventions/ Protocol/agreements and under the Montreal Protocol, has imposed ban on the import of used ODS/CFC based equipment. It has also ratified to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change by preparing national Green House Gases inventories and through launching "mitigation of Climate Change" and the "adoption of Global Change Principles" projects.
Biodiversity Action Plan, Desertification Combat Action Plan and the Medium Term Development Framework (2005-10) aim at achieving tangible progress. A modest approach has been adopted in MTDF to identify 115 Environment projects, in brown and green environment and inter-sectoral and capacity building areas.
Overall finance outlay for environment in MTDF was increased to around Rs. 21.708 billion with more than Rs. 10,743.77 million for human resource development, education and research. During last five years, substantial increase was made in allocations for environment sector to launch new projects in the areas of capacity building, afforestation and drought management.
But the country is still facing problems like waste management, better sanitation facilities, air pollution control, proper protection of forest covered areas and ecosystems, marine life, wildlife and control on the population growth.
The figures show that per capita water availability at present had decreased to 1100 cubic meter from 5300 cubic meter in 1951 and most of fresh water resources were being continuously contaminated. Around 60 percent citizens lack sanitation facilities and issues like open defecation were yet to be addressed.
Air and noise pollution were on rise with air pollution level in cities estimated at six times higher than the WHO standards. Less than 60 per cent of around 55,000 tone solid waste generated daily in urban areas is collected as there is no proper waste collection and disposal system at municipality level.
Deforestation rate has been estimated at 0.2 to 0.5 percent per annum and 29 million cubic feet wood is cut every year. Although the official figures show a negligible increase in forest covered area during last one and a half decade, yet the forests were highly endangered in areas with no other alternative energy resources.
Particular species rich ecosystems needed to be protected while desertification threatens vast tract of land. Inefficiency in energy sector is another challenge facing the country. This situation calls for environmental improvement through consistent, vigorous, concentrated and integrated efforts to ensure protection of environment and natural resources.
Citizen Community Boards and the Local Governments must be given a role to control environmental degradation. Alternative energy resources for forest area dwellers, launching air and water quality monitoring system and inclusion of environment chapters in curricula can also serve a lot.
Strict monitoring of the ongoing project, capacity building at all levels, NGOs effective participation and seeking more donors assistance are the other areas of immediate attention. Last, but not the least, there is a dire need for community awareness and promote sense of ownership through effective participation of all stakeholders to protect our environment and ensuring better future for coming generations.

—By Muhammad Aftab Zahoor (APP)