Islamabad - Environmental experts on Thursday said that massive deforestation in the federal capital was causing environmental pollution and distorting its natural beauty look.
They said that deforestation in the capital is harmful for the environment and that pollution would reach alarming level if the CDA did not plant more trees in the developmental areas. They believed that deforestation could also cause diseases such as sunstrokes and headaches.
“However in some areas, CDA is engaged in deforestation to widen the roads for coping with increased traffic,” they opined.
Environmental expert Dr Mehmood Khalid Qamar told this agency that Pakistan is already among the top ten countries where unusual weather patterns are making major environment impacts, and the situation may further deteriorate in the coming years if attention is not paid to issues related to climate change.
“Capital beautification is being damaged because of new construction and uprooting of trees,” Qamar said, suggesting that there was a need to take satellite images of Islamabad to gauge the most heat-emitting areas.
Former Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency Director General Asif Shuja said that due to widespread falling of trees and rapid urbanisation, temperature in the capital city has started to cross 44 degrees in summer.
A senior environment wing official of CDA told that the authority is in a fix, as it has to cope with the growing traffic problem on one hand and has to maintain the beauty of the city on the other. “The cutting of trees is resulting in increased air pollution and mercury in the city,” he said.