Concerted efforts stressed to achieve plantation targets

Islamabad

Federal Minister for Climate Change Zahid Hamid on Thursday asked the relevant authorities to make concerted efforts to achieve the ongoing monsoon tree plantation campaign targets.

"We must focus on indigenous plants like Green Pakistan Programme and come up with innovative ideas for monsoon plantation," the minister told an inter-provincial and inter-ministerial monsoon plantation campaign 2017 at the Ministry of Climate Change here.

The meeting was attended by the representatives of provincial forest departments and climate change ministry. The participants reviewed the targets achieved in the spring plantation 2017. They were told the target set for the spring plantations fixed with consensus among stakeholders was 257.5 million saplings and 200.83 million saplings had been planted.

The Punjab forest department set the target of 14 million and achieved 14.33 million. The survival rate was 102 per cent. The Sindh forest Department set the target of 14 million, achieved 15.89 million. The sapling survival rate was 70 per cent.

The Khyber Pukhtunkhawa set the target of 211.60 million and achieved 158.78 million with the survival rate of 85%. The Balochistan forest Department set the target of 1.5 million and achieved 1.31 million target with the survival rate reaching 85 per cent.

The Azad Jammu and Kashmir forest department set the target of seven million and planted 4.43 million saplings. The sapling survival rate was 70%. The Gilgit-Baltistan forest department set the target of 1.20 million and achieved 0.71 million, while the FATA forest department fixed the target of 4.10 million and achieved 3.99 million target with the survival rate coming to 85 per cent.

The Capital Development Authority set the target of planting two million saplings and planted 0.51 million. The Punjab Forest Department representative told the participants that they had fixed the target of 12 million for Monsoon plantation 2017 whereas it was nine million last year. The Khyber Pukhtoonkhawa forest department told the meeting that it had set the target of 70 million last year, which was the same for the current year. The Balochistan forest department said it had set the target of seven million tree plantations last year and 7.7 million were planted this year.

The AJK forest department told the participants that last year they fixed the target at three million and currently it was 3.7 million. It also decided that the national level monsoon plantation campaign 2017 would begin in the last week of July.