Proposal to give autonomous status to environmental bodies

Islamabad : The government is considering a proposal to give autonomous status to all environmental bodies to enable them to function without any kind of political interference.

According to the details, Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Climate Change Malik Amin Aslam is highly supportive of this idea and he is willing to talk to the provincial governments to implement it also in the provinces. The National Climate Change Policy has also urged that the environmental bodies should be financially independent and capable to implement the environmental agenda in line with international practices.

The climate change ministry is providing financial assistance to the environmental bodies working in the federal capital. Similarly, the provincial ministries also take care of the financial needs of their respective environmental bodies.

The environmental bodies both at the federal and provincial level have an important role to ensure sustainable and environment-friendly development. They issue environmental impact assessment reports about development projects. If they raise objections on any uplift project then legally it cannot be carried out by any authority. The Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency (Pak-EPA) has been playing an important role to protect the natural environment amid massive development projects being carried out in Islamabad.

Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Climate Change Malik Amin Aslam has said that Prime Minister Imran Khan wants environmental bodies to work independently and put in their best efforts to protect the natural environment.

He said the environmental bodies should not even fall under the ministry and should be totally autonomous and very powerful so that they can do their work without any political interference.

“But in the present structure, what we can do is that there will be positive interference from our end. We will finally achieve our target to make them autonomous in coordination with the provincial authorities,” he said.