ISLAMABAD: Pakistan seeks to generate over 34,000 jobs by September through its massive tree planting drive, the prime minister’s adviser on climate change, Malik Amin Aslam, said on Sunday.
The Ministry of Climate Change has announced a target of planting 200 million saplings across the country during the ongoing monsoon tree plantation season in a bid to lessen the impact of the changing climate and create job opportunities amid a slowdown in economic activity due to the coronavirus outbreak.
“The tree plantation activities during the ongoing three-month monsoon season will lead to generation of estimated 34,470 green jobs for daily wagers who have been rendered unemployed because of the COVID–19 pandemic,” Aslam said, as quoted by the ministry in a statement.
During the monsoon campaign, the ministry seeks to plant 80 million trees in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 60 million in Sindh, 37 million in Punjab, 14 million in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, 2 million in Gilgit-Baltistan, and 600,000 in Balochistan.
The current tree-planting initiative was inaugurated by Prime Minister Imran Khan in Kahuta, Rawalpindi, on Friday.
“Over the past two years of the present government, 300 million trees have been planted across the country,” Aslam said, adding that work is underway to reach 1 billion trees by June next year.
In 2018, Khan’s then newly elected government pledged to plant billions of trees to tackle the effects of climate change.
Pakistan has a high rate of deforestation and forest degradation, particularly in Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where illegal logging is rife and local communities depend on forests for livelihood.
