Daily Times

If you have ever been to Margalla Hills, Ayub National Park, Lal Suhanra National Park, Taunsa Barrage, Kinjhar lake or Hazarganji Chiltan National Park, you have enjoyed a protected area in Pakistan. Perhaps, you recall the freshness and vivacity of your moments spent at these and other similar places. Protected areas include game reserves, national parks, wildlife areas, and bird sanctuaries. These areas offer obvious (material) and hidden (non-material) benefits-also called ecosystem services. Ecosystem services include water supply, water filtration, nature-based tourism, carbon sequestration, climate regulation, clean air, and walking trails. Some of these benefits help counter climate calamities like the floods and heat waves that have been tearing through the country.

I recently analysed the ecosystem services that Pakistan’s 140 protected areas are giving us and published these results in a paper titled “Terrestrial protected areas: Understanding the spatial variation of potential and realized ecosystem services,” in the Journal of Environmental Management.

The good news is that Pakistan presently has some 12.27 million hectares in protected areas, making up around 14 per cent of the country’s total area. These are in all sorts of sizes, small and big, ranging from 80 (for example, Lakhi wildlife sanctuary in Sindh) to 2,837,230 hectares (for example, Cholistan game reserve in Punjab).

People keep destroying these areas for petty gains, not knowing how many benefits protected areas offer all of us. Sometimes, poverty and livelihood needs make people use these areas. But, in Pakistan, the biggest damages to protected areas come from weak TPA management that illegally colludes with businesses or vested interests to exploit these areas. By raising awareness about these areas, we need to unearth the relationships between the supply of benefits by protected areas and their use in neighbouring human communities.

The biggest damages to protected areas come from weak management that illegally colludes with businesses or vested interests.

After analysing the spatial relationships for the first time, my study shows that most of Pakistan’s protected areas lie at the lips of intensively urbanised areas: a majority of protected areas fall within 50 to 100 km of an urban centre of a population equal to or greater than 300,000 people. The results also show that 75 out of 140 protected areas produce less than average potential ecosystem services, meaning they are underperforming and in need of more protection. The lowest supply of ecosystem services comes from Kolwah Kap wildlife sanctuary with an area of 40,800 hectares, located 295 km from the immediate/closest urban centre.

Trotting out the protection of existing protected areas is more momentous.

There is a global call to step up the number of protected areas until at least 30 per cent of the Earth’s surface is protected by 2030 (also called 30×30). But, right now, today, stronger protection and better management of our existing protected areas must remain top of mind despite obstacles like terrain (desert), maintenance costs, or rainfall trends that may hamper the production of ecosystem services from certain protected areas. We really do need to take good care of the protected areas we have!

Because the future expansion of protected areas is not a fully sure-footed move, better protection of existing protected areas is more momentous. Earmarking swaths of land as protected areas is not enough. In Pakistan, there must be legislation for protected areas to make sure that they are not taken over by commercial interests or powerful institutions in the future.

Overall, my study underscores the importance of protected areas to urban communities and creates a backdrop for future spatial analyses on protected areas worldwide. Further research on the role of protected areas in shaping social behaviours will bring a sense of awe to both the international research community and environmental organisations.

The write works as an environmental scientist in a leading-edge water organisation in Canada and can be reached at tariq.aziz@uwaterloo.ca. He tweets @TAGondal