The ruling elite wants to engineer a city of skyscrapers and glitzy parks on the shoulders of the Margalla Hills. Alarmed by the scale of tree felling and land clearing across the capital, the World Wide Fund for Nature?Pakistan has warned that a 1,000?kanal park and a string of five?star hotels at the foothills of the National Park would pose “potentially irreversible” damage to a landscape that serves as the capital’s lungs and water filter.
The Margallas are home to rare birds and mammals and store the groundwater that keeps the city alive. Clearing forests here fragments habitats, disrupts wildlife corridors and wrecks services like groundwater recharge. Pakistan’s natural forests already cover only about five per cent of its land. Satellite data show around 9,000-10,000 hectares of tree?cover loss from 2001 to 2023. Large?scale tree removal has become routine in Islamabad. In January this year, the interior ministry told parliament that 29,115 trees had been cut in the capital and insisted more would be planted.
There is, to be fair, a legitimate argument for better public spaces, planned recreation, regulated tourism and sports facilities in Islamabad. The promise to plant more trees and review development through official channels should not be dismissed outright. The real test is whether this will be conservation-led planning or another case of branding concrete as greenery.
Just as worryingly, this scheme will displace thousands of working?class residents. These families built the city with their own hands, and now they urge the authorities to honour citizens’ right to housing. The capital’s water table has also plummeted. Unbridled construction has triggered new forms of urban flooding during the monsoon and pushed winter air closer to Lahore’s smog. Nationally, per-capita water availability has fallen from 5,000 cubic metres in 1947 to less than 1,000 today. Pakistan extracts around 65 cubic kilometres of groundwater each year, while nature recharges only 55. Seventy per cent of urban and more than 80 per cent of rural residents rely on unsafe drinking water.
Environmental law is not a hurdle to be cleared; it is a covenant with future generations. The Margalla Hills National Park and Shakarparian are already protected areas. Pakistan is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change, a fact its repeated collisions with floods, heatwaves and water stress have made brutally clear. This is a moment for legislators to tighten protections. Civil society and the courts must insist on transparent environmental assessments, no?go zones for development and fair resettlement for displaced communities. Our children deserve a capital that breathes. Giving them a concrete playground trades their future for short?term profits, and that is a bargain no one can afford to accept.
