A Requiem for the Margalla Hills

By Ayesha Khan

There is a particular grief in watching something die slowly, in full public view, while those paid to save it look away. That is the grief I carry every time I drive along the foothills of Islamabad and see, a little further each year, where the green line ends and the concrete begins.

An old forester once told me the Margallas are the lungs of the capital. Lungs don’t fail all at once. They fail breath by breath. We are now deep into the final breaths of the Margalla Hills National Park (MHNP).  “Yeh daagh daagh ujala, yeh shab-gazeeda sehar; Woh intezar tha jis ka, yeh woh sahar toh Nahin”  (Faiz)

The numbers alone should stop us. Margalla Hills park spans 17,386 hectares. It is one of the largest national parks embedded within any capital city on earth. It is home to leopards that returned from near extinction to 38 species of mammals, to hundreds of bird species, and to a watershed that quietly feeds the city’s water supply. This canopy is not scenery. It is infrastructure. Every mature tree pulls carbon dioxide from Islamabad’s air, cools the capital against the heat-island effect that chokes cities like Lahore and Karachi, and generates the oxygen that lets Islamabad breathe more easily. This is not sentiment. This is measurable ecological service, and it is being dismantled in front of us.

Year after year, the same pattern repeats. A road is widened. A restaurant is licensed. A “temporary” structure becomes permanent. Watchdog surveys confirm what our eyes already suspected. Between 2022 and 2024 alone, grass-covered area in the park fell from 38.47 percent to 31.90 percent. More than 180 illegal structures now sit inside boundaries that were meant to be inviolable. In April 2026, climate experts warned that development creeping into the park’s sensitive foothill zones poses “potentially irreversible risks” — habitat fragmentation, blocked wildlife corridors, a slow strangulation of an ecosystem centuries in the making. Every week, more than 17,000 trekkers and casual sightseers pour onto trails built for a fraction of that number, leaving behind mountains of waste. Add to this the wildfires — the most recent devastating blaze swept through in May 2026 — and you have a park being eroded from every direction at once: fire above, concrete below, waste in between.

The law is clear. The Islamabad Wildlife Ordinance of 1979 exists for precisely this purpose. Pakistan is bound under the Convention on Biological Diversity to conserve representative ecosystems and halt biodiversity loss within protected areas, and MHNP is exactly the kind of site that convention exists to protect. Under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement, converting a carbon-sequestering forest into concrete runs directly against our own climate commitments. In July 2025, the International Court of Justice issued a landmark advisory opinion declaring that States carry a binding legal duty to prevent significant environmental harm and to protect the right to a clean, healthy environment.

And yet Pakistan continues to draw down international climate finance — from the Green Climate Fund, from the National Disaster Risk Management Fund — under the promise of resilience, adaptation, and protection of exactly these ecosystems. Can we, in good conscience, say the money has bought the forest a single healthy season? Where are the audits — real, independent, published audits — of how this money is spent, by whom, and with what oversight and outcomes?

The harder truth is that this is not a failure of one institution. It is a failure of collective responsibility. It is the quiet collusion of convenience between government approvals, private commercial interests, and institutions across the public and civil society space that choose silence over confrontation. A report is launched. A file is moved. A license is issued. No one says no, because saying no is costly. Inquiries appear and then vanish into silence, with no public finding and no accountability. Individuals questioned for past performance now chair the very funds entrusted with Pakistan’s climate resilience money.

Days ago, the Interior Minister stood before an economic summit and declared that Pakistan’s governance system “has collapsed,” calling for new administrative units to fix what decades of the old order could not. The DG ISPR, more cautiously, agreed that governance “cannot remain static.” I fear that new provinces built on the same unreformed bureaucracy will only multiply the disease. The Margalla Hills are the proof sitting in plain sight, a few kilometers from where that statement was made. We do not lack laws. We do not lack international obligations. We do not lack funding. We lack the will to enforce any of it.

I am a born environmentalist and a development economist by training. I have spent years promoting technology and transparency as the most viable tools for recovery and rehabilitation. Let the Capital Development Authority’s every land-use decision on these hills be published, timestamped, and open to public challenge before a single tree falls. Let every rupee of climate finance be tracked to the meter of forest it was meant to save. Let every public and private sector institution mandated to protect our environment report annually and in public on the state of the Margallas.

Until such a day, I will not be mourning alone on these trails, watching the tree line recede a little further each year. Our future generations will stand and mourn too, maybe not with my quiet grief but with a violent grief at their barren future, wondering how their elders could allow their future to die a slow death from the accumulated cowardice of everyone who could have stopped it but chose convenience instead.