Ecosystem restoration fund on the cards: Amin Aslam

ISLAMABAD: Adviser to the Prime Minister on Climate Change Malik Amin Aslam Monday said ecosystem restoration fund was on the cards.

He said the allocation of funds for the 10 Billion Tree Afforestation Programme was the biggest ever investment in environment sector of the country, a press release said.

He also extended his felicitations to the participants for the approval of grant for 10 Billion Tree Afforestation Programme at the two day national workshop on experience sharing organized here by the Ministry of Climate Change in collaboration with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Pakistan.

He appraised that the Prime Minister of Pakistan had a special attention towards this programme because it had been acknowledged internationally at various fora.

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province played an immense role to achieve the target set by the Bonn Challenge and looking at the high level of success.

The new political government had up-scaled the plantation target from one billion to ten billion trees in this recently launched nationwide afforestation programme, Amin said.

“This will also pave the path for job creation for common people through green initiatives. The government is focused to increase the number of private nurseries for raising plants to generate the economic opportunities,” he added.

The workshop objective was to draw out commonalities of the best practices for each category of forests. The workshop outcome was expected to develop a set of General Standard Operating Procedures, implementation modalities and techniques for each category of forests.

The requisite information would be further used to develop the monitoring framework for the Ten Billion Tree Tsunami Programme.

In his welcome remarks, Country Representative IUCN Pakistan Mahmood Akhtar Cheema said IUCN was striving for the conservation of Nature in the country in partnership with the Ministry of Climate Change.

IUCN was in the process of consultation with the federal and provincial governments and the relevant stakeholders to comprehend the key challenges and to come up with concrete measures to tackle the issue of deforestation.

He stressed upon the exposure of technology based solution “ROAM” to the stakeholders for better planning and management. The Restoration Opportunities Assessment Methodology (ROAM), produced by IUCN and the World Resources Institute (WRI), provides a flexible and affordable framework for countries to rapidly identify and analyse areas that are primed for forest landscape restoration (FLR) and to identify specific priority areas at a national or sub-national level.

The workshop was attended by representatives from Ministry of Climate Change, Provincial Forest Departments, Ministry of Defence, IUCN staff and other stakeholders.

All the provincial forest departments presented their plans and targets for inclusion in the Ten Billion Tree Tsunami Programme.