Pak lodges formal complaint to UN
Pakistan has lodged an official complaint with the United Nations over damage caused to a protected forest reserve during an air strike by India last month, Pakistan's climate change minister Malik Amin Aslam Khan said on Monday.
The air strike in the Massar Jabba Forest Reserve had damaged a forest ecosystem which "could take up to a century to recover", said Khan, Prime Minister Imran Khan's adviser for climate change.
Khan said he handed over a dossier detailing the damage at the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) in Nairobi, calling on the global body to condemn India and seek compensation.
"We think what happened was a strike on nature - it was a strike on the Massar Jabba Forest Reserve which is a protected ecosystem and a globally important carbon sink," Khan told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview.
"We are speaking for the voiceless trees of the Massar Jabba forest reserve which became a target of this operation."
A report by Pakistan after the air strike found damage to an area of 1.2 acres which included 19 pine trees valued at 2.7 million Pakistani rupees ($20,000) and soil erosion.
Indian warplanes on February 26 bombed the hilly forest area near the northern Pakistani town of Balakot, about 40 km from India's border in the Himalayan region of Kashmir.
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