Save the Lungs of Islamabad: Why Shakarparian Can No Longer Afford Our Silence

To watch Shakarparian today is to mourn a broken promise. Not a fleeting vow, but a masterplan—conceived with purpose, codified on paper, and abandoned by design. I went through archives at Bazar Road, Iqbal Hall G-7, poring over the original master plan drawn up in 1960 by the great Greek architect and city planner Konstantinos Apostolos Doxiadis and his team. It was there that I first understood what Shakarparian was always meant to be. Doxiadis and his fellow planners did not design this triangle-shaped green expanse near Zero Point as an afterthought, a leftover patch of land between roads. They designated it, deliberately and explicitly, as the lungs of Islamabad — a temperature regulator, a natural sound barrier, a groundwater recharge zone, and a protective forest without which the city’s clean air was never meant to exist. This was not sentiment. This was engineering. And we have spent the decades since betraying it.

Islamabad in 1961 was home to barely 117,000 people. Today it holds well over 2.4 million. That growth was not an accident — it was, in part, the very success of Doxiadis’s vision: a green, livable, breathable capital that drew people in from across the country and beyond. But success has a cruel irony here, because the same city that grew because of its green lungs has spent decades quietly cutting into them. Between 1961 and 2024, Islamabad’s temperature has already climbed by 5 degrees Celsius, with projections warning of a further 0.7 degrees by 2039 and 2.2 degrees by 2069. This is the urban heat island effect, and it is not an abstraction — it is Doxiadis’s temperature regulator being dismantled, piece by piece, exactly as he warned it must not be.

Shakarparian itself covers roughly 1,376 hectares, formally absorbed into the Margalla Hills National Park in 1980, sitting almost at the very heart of the capital — an emerald set into the city’s crown, as it deserves to be called. A biodiversity survey conducted in November 2014 found 155 animal species sheltering within it: 23 species of mammals, 104 species of birds spanning 16 orders and 42 families, 22 species of reptiles, and 6 species of amphibians. The same survey catalogued more than 661 plant species across 28 families, with six distinct dominant vegetation communities knitting the forest floor together. This is not a park. This is a living, breathing ecological archive sitting in the geographic center of a national capital — a rarity almost nowhere else replicated in the world.

It was Roedad Khan — the legendary civil servant and statesman — who understood the fragility of this inheritance early enough to act. In 1989 he founded the Margalla Hills Society, and for decades that institution has done more than most government departments to keep the wider Margalla ecosystem intact. But Shakarparian, sitting apart within it, has not been so fortunate. It has instead become a recurring casualty of the very authority meant to protect it — the Capital Development Authority itself.

Piece by piece, lease by lease, CDA has allowed Shakarparian’s protective forest cover to be carved away. Look at what now occupies ground that was meant to remain forest: the Parade Ground, the Pak-China Friendship Centre, the Islamabad Club, the Gun and Country Club, Lok Virsa, an open-air theatre, and a string of upscale hotels and restaurants. Each addition was, in its own file, justified. Together, they are a forest reduced to a backdrop for institutions that no longer need it and increasingly cannot coexist with it. This has happened in direct violation of Regulation 4(3)(b) of the ICT Zoning Regulations of Islamabad, which exists for the explicit purpose of preventing exactly this kind of land-use change, allegedly under sustained political pressure. Satellite imagery from Landsat and Sentinel spanning the last twenty years tells the story without need for further commentary: the southwest region of Shakarparian shows a stark, measurable retreat of forest cover.

The judiciary, at least once, was willing to look squarely at this. On January 11, 2022, the Islamabad High Court delivered its verdict in Prof. Zahid Baig Mirza versus Capital Development Authority, and the ruling was unambiguous: the shifting of the Parade Ground into Zone 3, the widening of roads through the forest, and the construction of the China Friendship Centre inside Shakarparian all violated the ICT Zoning Regulations. It was, on paper, a vindication of everything Doxiadis intended and everything CDA had ignored. A court verdict that is not enforced, however, is simply another document gathering dust the way the original master plan itself so nearly did.

And here I have to say something that will not make me popular in certain circles of this city: the NGO sector stationed in Islamabad has failed Shakarparian as thoroughly as CDA has bulldozed it. The single biggest failure of these organizations is that they will not raise their own voice — they wait, always, for the government to raise it first, as though advocacy requires official permission. That is not activism. That is choreography. Too many of these NGOs are, in practice, family businesses wearing the language of conservation: leadership passed quietly within the same households for years, boards that never rotate, and a business model built not around planting a single tree in Shakarparian but around producing glossy reports, attending conferences, and mastering the art of recycling the same handful of buzzwords — resilience, sustainability, nature-based solutions — into slightly different sentences for slightly different donors. They are experts in rephrasing a crisis. They are not experts in stopping one. When the chainsaws reached the H-8 green belt, it was a lone campaigner and a worried student who spoke up first, not the well-funded organisations whose entire mandate is supposed to be exactly this.

This failure is made worse by the fact that the government itself is not short of obligations it has already signed onto. Pakistan is a party to the Convention on Biological Diversity, which binds it to conserve representative ecosystems and halt biodiversity loss inside protected areas — precisely what Shakarparian, folded into the Margalla Hills National Park, was designated to be. It is a party to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement, both of which make clearing carbon-absorbing forest for concrete a direct contradiction of the country’s own climate pledges. And in July 2025, the International Court of Justice — not to be confused with the International Criminal Court, though the two are often mixed up — 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. Domestically, the Islamabad Wildlife (Protection, Preservation, Conservation and Management) Ordinance of 1979 exists for precisely this purpose. Pakistan asks the world to trust its climate commitments while its own capital cannot honor a zoning regulation inside its own protected national park. That is not a technicality. That is a credibility problem, and it is one the government has authored for itself.

So what now? The path back is not mysterious — it has already been mapped out by people who love this forest more than they fear the authorities who keep failing it. The Islamabad Club, having long since expanded well beyond its original allotment, should be relocated to the southern part of the city rather than continue consuming forest land it was never entitled to. Every lease granted for hotels, restaurants, and private commercial development inside Shakarparian should be cancelled outright, and the land returned to the ecosystem it was stolen from. Government buildings currently occupying forest land should be shifted to a new sector of the city — a step that aligns, notably, with the fiscal discipline Pakistan has already committed to under its IMF program. And the proposed cricket stadium, which would carve yet another irreversible wound into what remains of this forest, must be shelved before a single tree falls for it.

Shakarparian, my favourite spot in this entire city, is where the larger argument becomes devastatingly concrete. Every lease CDA has quietly signed away could have been published, timestamped, and opened to public objection before a single brick was laid. Every violation of Regulation 4(3)(b) could have been flagged automatically rather than litigated years later, after the damage was already irreversible. Every NGO that claims to represent this forest’s interests could publish its own funding, its own leadership tenure, its own on-the-ground output, and let the public judge whether it has earned the right to speak for Shakarparian at all. The technology to do all of this exists today. What has been missing, every single time, is the will to use it before the forest, not after the court case, and the courage from those paid to advocate for it to speak before, not after, the public does it for them.

DOXIADIS GAVE ISLAMABAD ITS LUNGS BY DESIGN, NOT BY LUCK. He gave this city a forest meant to cool it, quiet it, and keep its air breathable for generations who would never know his name. We have spent sixty years slowly asphyxiating that gift — one lease, one road, one “temporary” structure at a time, while the institutions meant to guard it filed reports instead of raising alarms. I do not know how many more warnings, court verdicts, or degrees of rising heat it will take before Shakarparian is treated as the vital organ it was always meant to be, rather than surplus land waiting for its next tenant. But I know this: a city that forgets to protect its own lungs should not be surprised when, one day, it finds itself unable to breathe. Dear residents of Islamabad — this forest was drawn onto our master plan as an act of foresight. Let us not be the generation remembered for erasing it, nor the generation whose NGOs stood by, recycling the right words while the wrong things happened.

My last words, Despite the environmental losses, the ecological footprint can still be restored if the CDA and the Government are committed to rehabilitation. The natural ecosystem of Shakarparian can be revived to regain its original capacity for oxygen production, carbon absorption, and temperature regulation, helping to cool the local climate and improve environmental conditions