World Environment Day 2010: Cause for Pause or Celebration in Pakistan?

So another World Environment Day has come and gone. Doubtless, our environmental managers at the federal and provincial Environmental Protection Agencies would have organised some workshops and/or walks. Commitment to putting a stop to environmental degradation and to achieve all the targets contained in the National Environmental Policy (yes, we have one) would have been routinely expressed, sans conviction and without any explanation of how these commitments would move off the pages of policy documents and transform into tangible results. A profound sense of deja vu hits one at these events. Same promises, different faces, same frustration at lack of outcomes despite considerable inputs.

There may be even greater cause for alarm this year.

First, a few days before World Earth Day, the provincial government of Punjab announced, quite shamelessly and with great fanfare, that it had decided to allot more than 30,000 acres of forest land to 'jobless youth' (no doubt a euphimism for political cronies) for agricultural use, along with seed money (pardon the pun) of Rs.900,000 each. Amendments in the Forest Act 1927 were made to enable this plan because the British-enacted legislation prohibited conversion or use of forest land for any other purpose. And all this happens in the background of warnings by experts about the alarming rate of deforestation in the country (second worst in the world according to one source) and the fact that more than 1.44m of agriculture land is lying unutilised in Punjab.

Second, the Pakistan Economic Survey 2009-2010 released yesterday paints a dim picture of, amongst other things, the state of environmental management in the country. Consider this: only 44% of the population has access to sanitation facilities; the level of particulate matters in major cities is nearly 4 times higher than safe limits (see Figure 1); 40% of all deaths and 60% of those of children are related to water borne diseases with only four cities (Karachi, Faisalabad, Peshawar, Islamabad) equipped with water treatment plants, all workin under capacity and only the one in Islamabad meeting the National Environmental Quality Standards (NEQS); 92% of the industrial wastewater is dumped untreated into surface water resources like canals, rivers etc. Depressing is too mild a word to encapsulate the enormity of challenges.

And what of the industrial and corporate sector? Industries in Pakistan consume 23% of total water available and discharge around 9000 million gallons of wastewater from industrial activity into water bodies in Punjab and Karachi. Untreated. Daily. Nearly 70% of biological load is generated by textile and beverage industry with other notable (and habitual) partners in crime being the textile, tannery, paper and pulp.

Several positive initatives have emerged and often spearheaded from or facilitated by the public sector: the initiative to raise environmental awareness in schools, promotion of the use of CNG (Pakistan is the world's largest consumer of CNG according to the International Association of Natural Gas Vehicles, with 2.4m CNG-fueled vehicles as of the start of 2010) and moves for collaborative efforts to combat industrial pollution, such as the Effluent Treatment Plant in Korangi industrial area at Karachi, established at a cost of Rs500 million by a consortium of the government of Pakistan, the embassy of Netherlands, and Karachi’s district governments in addition to the Pakistan Tanners Association (PTA); even the controversial amendment by the Punjab government in the Forest Act 1927 referred to above has a silver lining in the form of enhancing the lefine for various offences, including theft of forest wood from the previous level of up to Rs500 (yes Rs.500!!) to Rs.1 million. The industry itself has also tried to address the problem, including through the installation of water treatment plants (133 in Punjab, 207 in Sindh and 2 in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa). But there are miles to go and promises to keep for the private sector. Indeed, studies such as the one by the SDPI suggest that the only way to effectively tackle environmental issues such as deforestation, is for the private sector to come good on its CSR promises and practices.

The problem, as always, lies with the utter failure to implement plans. And the pain of that failure is hightened by hollow politico-speak and designer commitments to for e.g enhance forest cover in Pakistan from the existing level of 5.2% to 6% by 2015, uttered in photo-op events and then signing into law decisions that will go the exact opposite way.