Pakistan has lodged an official complaint with the United Nations over damage caused to a protected forest reserve during an air strike by India last month, climate change minister Malik Amin Aslam Khan said on Monday. The air strike in the Massar Jabba Forest Reserve had damaged a forest ecosystem which "could take up to a century to recover", said Khan, Prime Minister Imran Khan's adviser for climate change.

Khan said he handed over a dossier detailing the damage at the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) in Nairobi, calling on the global body to condemn India and seek compensation. "We think what happened was a strike on nature - it was a strike on the Massar Jabba Forest Reserve which is a protected ecosystem and a globally important carbon sink," Khan told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview.

Copyright Reuters, 2019