ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan kicked off a 10 billion tree plantation drive in the historic city of Nankana Sahib in Pakistan’s eastern province of Punjab on Saturday, planting a sapling at a forest reserve to mark the inauguration.
Last year, the tree plantation drive was a huge part of Khan’s campaign promises on environmental policy and his party’s agenda for global warming.
“We are launching our #Plant4Pakistan programme & reclaiming mafia encroached land, converting it into forests and wild life parks for our future generations to fight climate change and pollution,” the Prime Minister wrote on Twitter.
According to a World Health Organization estimate, almost 60,000 Pakistanis died in 2015 from the high level of fine particles in the air, one of the world’s highest death tolls from air pollution. In recent years, Punjab has been badly hit by increasing smog, with air pollution levels in the eastern city of Lahore touching dangerous levels of toxicity.
In 2014, deadly floods during the monsoon season caused in part by soil erosion, submerged entire towns across the country and led to the deaths of 110 people.
Speaking to the press at the inauguration in Nankana, the Prime Minister said Pakistan was one of the world’s worst hit countries due to climate change.
"We will continue to reclaim land from land mafias all across Pakistan and utilize it for afforestation,” he said.
The provincial PTI government in Pakistan’s northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa undertook a similar province-wide initiative dubbed the billion tree tsunami when it came to power in 2013, with millions of saplings planted on once arid land.
Adviser to the Prime Minister on climate change, Malik Amin Aslam, also took to Twitter to announce the beginning of the project.
“10 #BillionTreeTsunami enters #Punjab with a bang,” he wrote.
Addressing press representatives, Nankana’s deputy commissioner Raja Mansoor Ahmed said that 2,500 acres of government land in Punjab had been recovered from illegal land grabbers and would be transformed into a forest and wildlife sanctuary.
