Staff Reporter
Islamabad
Prime Minister’s Advisor on Climate Change Tuesday said that protecting and restoring forests and other natural ecosystems while ensuring and respecting the protection of rights of the local forest-dependent communities was key to preserve the resource-rich biodiversity that forests contain. However, ignoring the rights of the forest-dependent communities, which earn livelihood from these forest resources would only harm the efforts aimed at conservation and protection of forests, Malik Amin Aslam warned.
The advisor expressed these views while delivering his address as a keynote speaker at event titled “Setting Pakistan’s Agenda for the 25th Session of the Conference of Parties (COP25) being organised in Spain this year from 2-13 December. He said that government under the leadership of Prime minister Imran Khan is committed to provide save environment to next generation and keep focusing on environment-friendly policies in the country.
The event focused on adaptation strategy. The three thematic areas of the event were climate change and human rights, the role of private sector in climate change and framing Pakistan’s agenda for COP25 with focus on adaptation strategy. “Given the realisation, we are assigned heightened importance to the protection of indigenous forest communities’ rights in out the country’s historically largest 10 Billion Tree Afforestation Programme (BTAP) and initiatives for conservation and protection of the existing forests,” Malik Amin Aslam told the participants of the event.
He said experiences of several countries had shown that afforestation and forest protection programmes implemented without consultation with the local forest communities had only failed. Thus, efforts are being made to consultant and engage forest communities at all scales while implementing the 10 Billion Tree Afforestation Programme. Spelling out environment and climate change-related programmes of the present government, Amin Aslam told participants of the panel discussion that the present government had launched four major initiatives as a part of climate change mitigation and adaptation and fighting environmental degradation.
