Chairman Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Imran Khan on Thursday reiterated that holding Pakistan Super League (PSL) final in Lahore in a bid to bring international cricket back to the country will not serve any purpose. "There is no international player in PSL final match, and the local players, except a few ones, are also unknown, so this kind of things for the return of international cricket won't work," he told a gathering after a briefing by Malik Amin Aslam, the architect of PTI's 'Green Growth Initiative.'
He launched the website through which the data of all the nurseries and existing plantations can be monitored. The PC-1 of the Billion Tree Project was also placed on the website to ensure transparency. The total cost of the project was Rs 22 billion, which the party claimed was completed at a cost of Rs 11 billion.
To a question, Imran said that instead of arranging the PSL final, the government should have held the entire PSL matches in the country, adding, "How can we give the message of peace by holding PSL final in a curfew like situation when the number of the police would outnumber the spectators."
The PTI chairman said that under the 'Billion Tree Project', the provincial government took a number of activities to reverse the past sixty years of deforestation. The major challenge for his party to make the programme successful, according to Imran, was crackdown on timber mafia. He said that crackdown on the timber mafia backed by powerful corrupt politicians could not have been possible without the support of the chief minister, who adopted zero tolerance towards illegal cutting of trees.
"We'd to face resistance from the timber mafia and all this become possible as Chief Minister Khattak, the forest minister, and the secretary forest Nazar Shah took personal interest...I appreciate their services and their commitment to the cause which will help reduce global warming in future," he added.
He also claimed of retrieving 60,000 kanals of forest land from the timber mafia. At the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, the project was recognised by the Bonn Challenge - a global partnership aimed at restoring 150 million hectares of the world's deforested and degraded lands by 2020.
Malik Amin Aslam said that the KP government pledged to restore 384,000 hectares of degraded land (by reforestation) under its "Billion Tree Tsunami" project and has achieved 75 percent target of one billion tree plantation target and the survival rate of the sapling remained 75 per cent. "The KP through this project has become the first sub-national entity in the world to enter this monitored regime, which also includes big forest countries such as the US, India and Brazil," he added.
At the moment, 250 million saplings are on ground, clearly marked through GPS positioning on GIS maps, he said, adding out of these, more than 50 per cent have been generated through private-sector nurseries and this ratio is designed to go up in the coming years.
In order to ensure accountability and transparency, the project is being monitored through a three-tier system - at the department level, through the strategic unit of K-P and through independent, outsourced monitoring being done by WWF.