DSTUDY THE IMPACT OF RECENT DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES ON GREENING THE ENVIRONMENT OF ISLAMABAD

Abstract

Islamabad was built in 1960 as a capital of Pakistan. It is a city famous for its beauty, greenery, and beautiful trees. The total area of Islamabad is 906 km2 . With increasing population, a lot of development projects have been initiated within the city, which had a huge impact on the vegetation. Awareness of urban vegetation, environmental quality and knowledge is really important for conservation of natural resource, management and improvement of ecosystem of urban resources. The impact of these development activities on vegetation was assessed for the last twenty years within Islamabad using remote sensing techniques. For this purpose, satellite images of Landsat were acquired for 1992, 2000, and 2013. Supervised classification and NDVI analysis were done to calculate the area under vegetation and other classes of all the images. Analysis of these satellite images revealed that vegetation was very dense in the past, but with the passage of time the vegetation loss became significantly prominent. Vegetated area estimated for 1992, 2002, and 2013 shows that the total area under vegetation is 58, 50, and 34 % respectively of the total area of Islamabad. The overall rate of vegetation loss between 1992 to 2013 was 10.02 km2 (per year) which is 1.09 %. Furthermore sector wise analysis was done to find out the most vulnerable area with respect to vegetation loss. The included H-10, G-13, G-5, and D-13. Residential sectors (G-13 and D-13) were found to be at high risk as compared to educational sectors (H-10 and H-12) and diplomatic enclave (G-5). Although, some initiatives are being introduced to control vegetation area, but they do not match the pace of vegetation loss. Necessary measures need to be taken to maintain and improve vegetation to the desired level.