Their tremendous contribution has developed human cultures and civilisation. Today this very old friend of mankind is in trouble as ruthless cutting and uprooting of trees has significantly shrunk the forests over the last several thousands years.
According to an estimate the planet's original forest cover may have been reduced to nearly 50 percent since the time of the earliest civilisations. More importantly, it seems the merchants of death for trees have no intention to relent, as the pace of deforestation has been accelerating. A vast area of tropical forest has vanished during the 1990s.
Forest area of Pakistan reported in different official documents has varied over the years with administrative and political changes in the country as well as with changes in methods of reporting data. Different government departments have been publishing different forest statistics since 1947.
The total area of forests in Pakistan is 4.224 million hectares, which is 4.8 percent of the total land area. However, the farmland trees and linear planting along roads, canals and railway tracks covering an area of 466,000 hectares and 16,000 hectares, respectively, do not fall under definition of forests.
The situation is also similar, but to a lesser extent, in the case of miscellaneous plantations over an area of 155,000 hectares. Between 1981 and 1990, there had been a 4.3 percent decrease in forest areas of the Tropical Asia and Oceania, which Pakistan is a part of. During the same period, 0.6 percent deforestation had been occurring each year. This is an alarming situation and needs to be stalled and then reversed, if possible.
As recognition of the multiple values of forests has grown, so have concerns for their disappearance. In Pakistan, forests are being lost because of questionable land use practices and the ever-increasing demand for timber and firewood.
Total forest area under the control of the Forest Departments, including Azad Kashmir and the Northern Areas, is 4.26 million hectares. The per capita forest area is only 0.037 hectares compared to the world average of one hectare.
Experts have warned that if the situation was not checked forests will disappear in the coming 20 to 25 years.
Landowners have converted large areas of forest into agricultural land. Forests are at the mercy of the axe and people including policemen and officials of forest department stand accused of patronising the timber mafia.
Timber smuggling has become a lucrative business in the NWFP, which has the most forest cover of the country. Wood is smuggled to Punjab. Massive illegal cutting of Shisham trees took place earlier this year while the large-scale slaughter of forests continues.
The timber mafia is doing this criminal business with the connivance of the officials of forest department and other related departments after getting permits issued by the government.
During an illegal tree-falling operation, the NWFP government instead of seizing the wood and penalising the culprits, allowed the timber mafia to export the wood to other provinces.
According to a Provincial Forest Resource Inventory, tree cover in accessible forest, which forms 75 percent of the total forest area of the Frontier province, would vanish by the year 2025. The Inventory reveals that 75 percent of the total forest area, which is accessible or left unprotected in the province, would vanish between 2015 and 2025 in view of the increasing over exploitation of the forest reserves for commercial purposes and heavy consumption of wood for its usage as an alternative to fuel by the people living in the forest areas.
Furthermore, the study finds out that there would be no locally available industrial timber for 40 years from 2025 to 2065 when the regenerations planted in mid-eighties of the last century get matured for harvesting.
In 1947, cedar, maple, ash, pine, fir, oak, spruce, and walnut trees covered at least 42 percent of Azad Kashmir. The timber mafia has cut the forests down and less than 11 percent of Kashmir remains forested even though there is a complete ban on the cutting of green trees in the AJK.
However, the October 8 earthquake was a natural calamity, the ruthless exploitation of forests by the timber mafia and cutting, even completely uprooting of trees, have been instrumental in adding to the tragedy in the NWFP and the AJK.
The future of country's forests seems bleak because government functionaries don't care about the contribution of trees to our life.