(Published in The Nation Pakistan)
My favourite singer Jim Morrison once said, “Whoever controls the media controls the mind.” This is true anywhere in the world but the Pakistani media takes this particular cake. Let’s start with the news channels, which show inane programmes for women in the morning, replete with faux weddings, beauty tips and the like.
(Published in The Nation Pakistan)
It is important for Muslims as well as the rest of the world to realize that if criticism of Islam is not allowed, we will continue to see such acts of terror. If people are forced to go through rituals they no longer believe in, Muslims will not become part of the modern world. And most importantly, the denial that this had nothing to do with Islam, and the tagline that the killers could never be Muslims, must be abandoned.
(Published in The Nation Pakistan)
It is all very well to say that anyone who spouts such hate speech should be stopped, but why not also say that such expressions should be eliminated from our national psyche? And to do that we must start at the source of the problem.
(Published in The Nation Pakistan)
The students from these ‘education networks’ come out with only one agenda: Islamic supremacy. Humanity seems to get lost somewhere on the way. And when that is the only thing you know, when you have not been given the chance to learn other things and to question what is being taught, the end result, more often than not, is what we see happening in the country right now.
(Published in The Nation Pakistan)
It is not enough to protest against atrocities. It is time to stop thinking that our constitution is something that can never be changed. It can and it should be and we must not be afraid of asking for this. Keep religion out of the state and we would have taken the first step towards changing the hyper Islamic mind-set that is prevalent in the country.
Protected areas perform many functions; conserving biodiversity as well as delivering vital services that contribute to human wellbeing. Protected landscapes embody important cultural values; some of which reflect sustainable land use practices.
However, now they face many challenges, such as threats associated with pollution and climate change, irresponsible tourism, infrastructure development and ever increasing demands for land and water resources. Over the years funding for protected area management has declined, while the requirement for funding has increased.
In 1993 Lao PDR became a leader in national protected area system design. After many years of research and establishing baseline biodiversity surveys, Lao PDR sought to protect 5-20% of every ecosystem present in Laos. The result was the national designation of 20 National Protected Areas, plus two corridors and the adoption of a number of laws and regulations pertaining to NPA management. Following the addition of one NPA site to the system increases the total to 21 NPAs nationwide covering almost 15% of the land area.
Read more at protected-areas-financing-lao-powpa-final
We undertook an economic valuation of mangrove forests in Balochistan province of Pakistan drawing on primary data from a survey of 80 households depending on mangrove forests. It was found that the direct value of mangroves was USD 1,287 per hectare, while the total value for the village was calculated to be USD 4,419,935. We found that rich households made more absolute use of the mangrove products and services and the poor made more relative use. Any decrease in the quality of this ecosystem would expose the poor to the worst effects of poverty. We argue that investments in mangrove conservation under comanagement regime in this region of Pakistan make ecological and economic sense.
In the past decade, the international development community has increasingly focused its attention on illegal logging and other forest crimes, and on the underlying weaknesses in law enforcement that allow them to flourish. At the same time, it has come to acknowledge that illegality often stems from broader failures of governance, and that strengthening law enforcement alone will not work unless the laws themselves, and the processes and institutions that influence forest use, are also improved (World Bank 2006).
Illegal logging is a serious obstacle to the efforts of timber producing and consuming countries to alleviate poverty, to develop their forests sustainably, and to protect forest ecosystem services. The international response to this problem began with the G8 Action Programme on Forests, agreed by G8 foreign ministers in 1998 and featuring illegal logging as one focus of action. This led to a series of regional ministerial conferences and processes on Forest Law Enforcement and Governance (FLEG), coordinated by the World Bank. The European Union also made a strong commitment to combating illegal logging and the associated trade in timber through its Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan, adopted in 2003.
One contribution to this process has been the IUCN project Strengthening Voices for Better Choices (SVBC). Formulated in response to a call from the European Commission for proposals to support implementation of the FLEGT Action Plan, SVBC sought to promote more effective forest governance in six key tropical forest countries: Brazil, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ghana, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Viet Nam.
Three regional FLEG processes have been established to date: in Southeast Asia (ministerial conference held in Bali in 2001), in Africa (Cameroon, 2003), and in Europe and North Asia (Russian Federation, 2005). Another process is planned for Latin America and the Caribbean.
The Action Plan focuses on seven broad areas: 1) support to timber-producing countries; 2) promoting trade in legal timber; 3) public procurement policies; 4) support for private sector initiatives; 5) safeguards for financing and investment; 6) the use of existing legislative instruments or adoption of new legislation; and 7) conflict timber. This synthesis, then, provides background to the concept of governance and how it has evolved in the fields of development and conservation. Drawing on a review of different definitions of governance, it identifies several key elements of governance and uses these to organise the synthesis of the findings of the SVBC national assessments.
Click here to read the whole publication
The seventh largest coral reefs in the world, based in the Maldives, provide an immense economic value to the nation’s economy highlighting the need for the tourism and fisheries sectors to make marine and coastal conservation a priority.
