Despite pledges every year on the World Environment Day (WED) - cleaner environment remains an uphill task for the governments, particularly in the developing countries. Like other many developing nations, in Pakistan as well, when the World Environment Day was being celebrated, millions of people were desperately looking for cleaner air, clean drinking water and better sanitation and living facilities.
Although the government, international organisations and the community have been doing their best to cope with this situation, but during last few years, the growing population and depleting resources nullified their efforts.
The situation kept worsening and even the accelerated efforts could not stop incidents like deaths in Hyderabad due to drinking contaminated water and the killing of fish in Rawal Lake.
The country is also facing problems like waste management, protection of forest covered areas and ecosystems, marine life, wildlife and control the population growth.
"Cleaner and safe drinking water is yet a dream for us. We have been listening about installation of Clean Drinking Water Plants. But, when they will be in place, let us see," said a lawyer Aurangzeb Khan.
"At least the government, after claiming to achieve economic stability, must now pay heed to these basic needs," he added.
Almost all the big cities, despite the government efforts, still lacked the basic environmental needs of any human beings for a better life.
No doubt, a new Environment Policy to control environmental degradation was formulated aims at strengthening sectoral institutional capacity, raise environmental awareness, promulgate environmental legislation including National Environment Quality Standards and the establishment of Environment Tribunals.
Since 2001, endeavours were made for healthy environment and sustainable livelihood by improving quality of air, water and land with civil society co-operation.
Various projects were started to effectively execute the National Environmental Action Plan (NEAP), protection and management of land resources; combating deforestation and drought; sustainable agriculture; conservation of biological diversity; environmentally sound biotechnology management and protecting ocean has been the main focus.
"We have been striving for cleaner environment," said DG Pak-EPA, Asif Shuja Khan when asked to comment on this situation.
"Clean Drinking Water Project has been approved and will be launched shortly," he was confident.
Pakistan is a signatory to many international conventions, protocol and agreements and has also ratified the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and launched "mitigation of Climate Change" and the "adoption of Global Change Principles" projects.
Biodiversity Action Plan and Desertification Combat Action Plan and Medium Term Development Framework of Environment (MTDF 2005-10) are the other measures.
The MTDF has selected 115 Environment projects, in brown and green environment and inter-sectoral and capacity building areas and overall finance outlay for MTDF has been substantially increased to Rs. 21.708 billion.
According to Environment Minister, Major Tahir Iqbal (Retd), allocations for environment in the next fiscal year budget have been increased by five times.
The minister was confident that the coming years will see the situation improving.
"We have launched number of projects in environment sector. But it takes some time for an overall change," he said.
On the other side, per capita water availability had decreased to 1105 cubic meter from 5300 cubic meter in 1951 and most of fresh water resources were severely contaminated.
Around 45 per cent of total population lacked access to relatively safe drinking water and around 60 per cent lacked sanitation facilities.
Air pollution, in urban areas, was estimated at six times higher than the WHO standards while noise pollution and waste management had also emerged as the other serious issues.
Less than 60 per cent of total 54,850 tone solid waste generated daily in urban areas is collected, as there is no proper waste collection and disposal system at municipality level.
Deforestation rate has been estimated at 0.2 per to 0.5 per cent per annum and the 4.8 per cent forest covered area could not be substantially increased since 1992. More 29 million cubic feet wood is cut every year.
Ten particular species rich ecosystems were considered to be critically threatened while desertification affects over 43 million hectares of land every year.
The prevailing situation requires consistent, vigorous, concentrated and integrated efforts to ensure conservation of natural resources and control air and water pollution by making sizeable investment during coming years.
Community mobilisation through Citizen Community Boards and the Local Governments and promoting sense of responsibility among them can lead to a better change.
Strict monitoring of ongoing projects, building capacity at all levels, NGOs effective participation, involvement of donors, inclusion of environment chapters in curricula and launching air and water monitoring system are other key areas of attention.
Last, but not least, awareness programmes, strict implementation of existing laws and judicious efforts by all stakeholders were direly needed at this juncture.
Let, we all pledge on this day to protect our environment and ensure better future for the coming generation and evaluate on the next World Environment Day that how far we had been successful. We should never forget that it is our collective responsibility.
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