Forests, Fires, and Pakistan

Deforestation has been at a higher pace in Pakistan than afforestation. The coverage of forests now stands at less than five percent of the total land area, which is one-fifth of what should have been the ideal proportion of 25 percent of the land area of an ecological nation. The forest coverage per capita in Pakistan is 0.05 hectares of land, whereas it is one hectare on average in the world. Thousands of hectares of forest are disappearing annually because of logging activities, forest fires, and forest land conversion for cultivation and other uses. At the same time, every government in power has launched a new tree-planting campaign, which is larger in scale than the previous one.

Reasons for the Slow Growth

Let us start with the weather conditions in the country first: nearly 60 percent of the country receives inadequate precipitation to sustain any forest on its own. Only those areas that receive rainfall and have other favorable conditions for the sustenance of a forest survive. These forests are limited to some special areas only: the temperate forests in the northern mountainous region, narrow riverine strips on the banks of the Indus, the mangrove forests in the Indus delta, and the plantation forests sustained through human labor.

Add the high population growth rate of more than 2.5 percent on top of it, and the equation becomes unworkable. As far as the consumption of wood goes, it satisfies almost a third of the energy requirements of the country. Wood is used widely for heating and cooking purposes in rural as well as urban areas.

Fire As a Rapidly Growing Menace

Fire used to be something unfortunate. It has turned out to be something inevitable. The Margalla Hills above Islamabad have had nearly 300 fires within the last two decades, consuming 25,000 hectares of plants and shrubs and beginning the season in April, not in June. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Azad Kashmir, Chitral, and Hingol National Park of Balochistan, you can find a similar pattern all over Pakistan’s map.

The components are almost always the same—a long dry period, strong winds, dry leaves and wood acting as fuel for the flames, and a spark—a human being. Fire doesn’t consume the area without a trace. Soil microorganisms die out, regeneration is impossible, the dense forest is reduced to........

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