Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has sought a report after Suparco images showed that tree cover around Rawal Lake Park had fallen by roughly half between 2004 and 2024. The images capture two decades of construction, encroachment and official complacency around a reservoir that supplies water to over 5.7 million people living in the region.
Rawal Lake Park forms only one part of a much larger catchment, and the satellite comparison cannot measure every ecological change around the reservoir. Its message remains plain enough. The catchment feeds a dam already burdened by sedimentation. Official reporting in 2012 found that Rawal Dam had lost 37 per cent of its designed storage capacity to silt. Clearing vegetation from slopes and open land accelerates runoff, carries more soil into the lake and eventually raises the cost of supplying water to the twin cities.
Trees are usually treated as amenities, while roads, commercial facilities and housing schemes are treated as development. That distinction stands as far from reality as night is from day.Executive Branch
Mature canopy lowers surface temperatures, absorbs rainfall, reduces erosion and protects water quality. Still, the Economic Survey puts forest cover at around 4.11 million hectares, or only 4.7 per cent of the country’s land area. It also estimates annual forest loss at roughly 11,000 hectares. Other surveys scream a far more abysmal reality check: Pakistan has too little established cover to squander it through weak regulation and opaque approvals.
The federal capital should have been the easiest place to reverse this logic. It has a single development authority, extensive government land, access to satellite monitoring and the administrative capacity to map every major clearance. Instead, the CDA has often operated as both regulator and developer, creating a built-in conflict between preserving public green space and monetising land. Earlier this year, the authority acknowledged that around 29,000 trees had been cut while arguing that replacement planting exceeded removals.
The problem extends well beyond Islamabad. Riverine forests have been degraded by encroachment and altered water flows, and northern slopes are under pressure from roads and construction. The country has learnt, at immense human and fiscal cost, that climate damage grows through everyday administrative choices long before it appears in a disaster-relief appeal.
Ergo, the prime minister’s intervention now requires a financial and regulatory response. The government should require the CDA to publish a satellite-linked account of tree loss, permissions granted and land-use change across the Rawal catchment since 2004. Future projects should carry the cost of maintaining replacement cover over years, rather than satisfying an approval condition through a one-day plantation exercise.
