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THATTA: For decades, grazing animals and loggers have destroyed thousands of trees in Pakistan’s Indus River Delta, home to the world’s largest arid mangrove forests.
The Indus Delta has about 95 percent of Pakistan’s total mangrove forest cover, and was once home to eight mangrove species, which the Sindh Forestry Department (SFD) says have halved forest destruction .
By 2005, mangrove cover had fallen to 84,000 hectares – the lowest level on record – from 260,000 hectares in the 1980s.
In 2019, as part of an ongoing campaign to improve forest cover, SFD worked with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to set up a mangrove nursery, hiring 250 women not only to plant new trees but also to protect them against threats from animals. and humans.
Engaged with their families, the women, officially called eco-guards, play a “vital role in the protection of mangroves, which is a job of the family unit,” said Riaz Ahmed Wagan, SFD’s chief mangrove conservator, at Arab News.
SFD assessments showed that mangrove cover increased further to reach 210,000 hectares in 2020.
Women eco-guards, Wagan said, played a big role in improving the numbers.
One of them, Hawa Dablo, 60, from Mero Dablo, a fishing village by the Arabian Sea, said she spent her days planting seeds, tending to saplings. and to stand guard, along with other members of his family, against trees destroyed by stray animals.
“I have been working here for two years since this nursery was established in my village,” Dablo told Arab News.
She said the most vulnerable trees were young mangroves which needed to be protected from grazing camels and buffaloes as well as local loggers.
“In order to preserve the mangroves, people are launching initiatives from their own households and at the personal level,” said Dablo. “Each household or village will ensure that their animals are released for free grazing only in areas where there are mature mangroves; the locals will ensure that the animals do not touch the areas where new plantations have been built. “
But she said illegal logging remained a threat, even though it was no longer endemic.
“If we notice mangrove cutting activity, we let the male members of our family take further action,” Dablo said. “When there is a deliberate cutting of mangroves, mostly by outsiders, we complain to local SFD officials through our male partners.”
Dr Tahir Rasheed, regional manager of the Sindh and Balochistan wing of WWF Pakistan, said that under the mangrove protection program, women rangers received a small stipend and were given incentives “including sewing machines to make sewing and embroidery, coolers, and fishing ponds to improve their livelihoods. “
The incentives, he said, were important in a region where nearly 90 percent of the population is estimated to live below the poverty line.
Most households in the delta depend on fishing and preserving the mangroves was essential to maintain the marine ecosystem, another woman eco-guard explained, as a wide variety of fish lay their eggs in the mangroves of the delta. .
“We keep the mangroves and don’t allow people to cut green mangroves,” said Razia Dablo from the fishing village of Khariyoon Takur Island. “If there are no more green mangroves, it will destroy the fish ecosystem; it will negatively affect our livelihoods. “
In addition to employing eco-guards, the SFD has given full-time and part-time “green jobs” to more than 50,000 people since 2000, about 40 percent of them women.
“Despite social restrictions that limit women’s work outside the home, women’s participation in reforestation in the Indus Delta represents almost half of the total forest sector workforce, which is a great achievement, ”said Wagan. “For future planting projects in the delta and elsewhere, we plan to get maximum participation from women.”
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