Media urged to highlight environmental issues | Pakistan Press Foundation (PPF)

Pakistan Press Foundation

Media urged to highlight environmental issues

Perwez Abdullah

Karachi: The cice-chancellor of the Federal Urdu University of Arts, Science & Technology (FUUAST), Dr Muhammad Qaiser, has voiced concern over the increasing level of environmental pollution in the country and the resulting destruction of the ecological balance and urged the print and electronic media to initiate an awareness campaign for the public on a war footing.

Dr Qaiser was speaking at a seminar on ‘environmental pollution’, organised jointly by the departments of botany and environmental sciences in the Gulshan Campus on Monday.

Dr Qaiser urged the universities to join hands and start research to recognise the cause of pollution and to combat this menace, a dangerous and disturbing situation, but still ignored by majority of the people in the country.

He told the audience that though his university was quite new, yet it had recognised the importance of pollution, and its various departments were researching to evaluate and then initiate some solution to the problem.

The Chairman of Port Qasim Authority (PQA), Admiral (retired) Muhammad Shafi, the chief guest at the seminar, said that the PQA had relatively quite less pollution because they were taking care to ward pollution off.

“The largest concentration of mangroves is around the Port Qasim area, and we are taking a lot of care to keep it intact and even increase the area after planting new mangrove species there. This has become imperative that we care about our environment. Then the environment will take care of us,” he said.

Dean of the Faculty of Homeopathy, Dr Syed Kamaluddin, lamented the fact that the people had not yet realized the full impact of environmental degradation.

“The cleanliness is one of the most important tenets in Islam and if the people start to obey that there could be no pollution around us. But unfortunately we do not care about this important aspect.”

Dr Moinuddin Ahmed, a faculty in the department of botany, reminded the audience that the exhaust from the vehicles and the factories contained poisonous gases and they were very harmful especially for the human lungs and respiratory system and the finely-woven fabric of the plants and trees, which were lungs for the environment.

“We should be careful about this type of air pollution. The burning of tyres during some protest demonstrations caused immense environmental pollution. I wonder why the people do not understand this basic fact. One incidence of tyre burning is equal to one week of pollution by other sources,” Dr Ahmed warned.

Prof Arif Zubair from the department of environmental sciences reminded the participants that the two of the most basic factors for scarcity of water in the country were lack of rains and absence of master plans to preserve the water from various resources.

“A total of only 16 million acres of land is irrigated out of 34 million acres. We need more dams to preserve our water resources,” he said.
Source: The News
Date:6/7/2011