Green Balochistan Organization; a community based volunteer group planted trees in different areas of the province for the protection of climate.
According to the organization’s spoke person that campaign started from mid-February till 30th of March, 2020 and it was consisting of two phases. In the first phase, a group of volunteer record awareness messages on social media platform such as Facebook with hash tag “#GreenBalochistan #Tree #Plantation #Campaign_2020” and also distributed pamphlets on the public places such as shopping malls, religious places masjid, and church etc.
In the second phase of the campaign, volunteers planted in different locations (schools, graveyards and street locality) of the province.
According to organizations founder that “we had started this campaign in 2018 and since then, we have been planting tress every year. Till now, we have planted more than 2,000 trees at different areas of the province. The main objectives and goals of this campaign were very clear; “our main focus is educating people to at least plant one tree in your locality, because in this whole campaign, we urged on written and oral messages about the importance of planting trees and recent challenges of climate change in the world specifically in Balochistan, is facing severe climate changes which resulted into polluted air and shortage of water in the province”.
While talking to community and media persons, he added that it was an initiative led and supported by community volunteers, to aware public about the emerging issue of global warming specifically Balochistan, which is the poorest & largest province of Pakistan is facing the severe climate change challenges in terms of drought, flood, deforestation, water shortage, and degradation of agriculture, livestock problems these days. These environmental challenges and problems badly affected the province in various ways. First, the reduced rainfall in winter & moon soon season brought drought situation in most of the district of Baluchistan. Second; the environmental changes also made socio-economic situation worst. The province’s major economy is agriculture and livestock which disrupted by floods & long spell of drought in the province. In the same way, such hazardous situation created more issues for the people like poverty, scarcity of water health, food insecurity and malnutrition etc.
In context of democracy and human rights, climate change is a real challenge in the way of socio-economic development of a nation. In this regard, according to Global Climate Risk Index report 2018, Pakistan was ranked on 8th by most affected by climate change in last two decades. Specially, Baluchistan affected the most by these changes and it disrupted the social and economic life of people. While achieving the target of SDG 13 (safety of healthy environment & protection) goal of UN, government of Balochistan needs a policy intervention at provincial level.
In the final remarks, the volunteer leader said that its responsibility of every citizen to take part in community work and serve humanity. He hoped that next year, we will involve more community people and plant more trees in order to save our environment.
Shams Ullah Durrani 