akistan is bearing the brunt of extreme climatic conditions ranging from heatwaves to flooding. Last year’s devastating flood was one of the most extreme instances seen in nearly 40 years. Millions displaced, livelihoods lost and economic damage running into hundreds of millions are not accidental. The loss is decided long before the water arrives. It is decided by land use, by drainage, by soil and by what is growing on the ground.

The Punjab government recently announced the Neem Yatra programme for planting 5,000 neem trees across the province. While this is a small number in a province that has planted around 50 million trees in the last two years, what makes this programme unique is the species: neem.

Neem belongs to the dry subcontinental belt. This native species has been growing in Punjab’s villages, graveyards and courtyards for centuries, which means that it has already passed the only test that matters: surviving a Punjab summer without being watered. Climate experts have been pressing for exactly such a shift towards indigenous species, describing neem as drought-tolerant, low-maintenance, a carbon absorber and a filter that pulls dust out of the air.

Beyond being a native species, a neem tree cools the ground beneath it through shade and transpiration. In a province where heat related mortality is prevalent, shade is a necessity.

Moreover, Lahore’s particulate crisis leading to smog which is caused partly by combustion and partly by re-suspended road and construction dust, can also be reduced by a rough-leaved canopy like neem along roadways.

Neem also does not compete with natural aquifers. That distinction matters because the Punjab spent decades planting other species (like eucalyptus) that do. A mature eucalyptus can take up over 100 litres of water a day, a figure established by Dr Ashraf Bodla at the Nuclear Institute of Agro-Biology in Faisalabad around 1989-1990. In the early 1980s, widespread eucalyptus planting on denuded hillsides in Swat, Bajaur and Buner dried up thousands of freshwater springs. Conocarpus followed the same pattern in urban Pakistan. Karachi’s municipal administration eventually began replacing it with neem. In a province drawing down groundwater faster than it recharges, a thirsty exotic planted at scale is not a green asset; it is a hazard multiplier that takes years to reveal itself.

Native species work in the other direction. Deep-rooted trees hold soil structure on canal banks and field margins, slow surface runoff and keep infiltration pathways open so that rainfall recharges the aquifer instead of sheeting into low-lying settlements. That is flood risk reduction and drought risk reduction purchased with the same sapling: neem.

Internationally, similar programmes encouraging careful selection of plantation through native species have shown promise: South Korea is the clearest case at national scale. Forest cover climbed from roughly 35 percent after the Korean War to about 64 percent today, driven by more than 11 billion trees planted between 1973 and 1987 alongside.

The First South Korean Forest Rehabilitation Plan combined planting with erosion control and forest protection. It exceeded its target by planting 1.08 million hectares. By 2013, the gain in forest area and growing stock was valued at $92 billion, equivalent to 9 percent of national GDP.

Another example is the African nation of Niger, where more than five million hectares of degraded landscape have been restored over roughly two decades, regenerating some 200 million trees. Tree and shrub cover increased ten to twenty fold; at least 250,000 hectares of degraded land came back into crop production and the time women spent collecting firewood fell from two and a half hours to half an hour.

The decisive reform was legal, not agricultural. Under inherited colonial rules, trees on a farmer’s land belonged to the state. This made every tree a liability and encouraged farmers to clear them. Once tenure shifted to the farmers, protecting a tree became self-interest rather than an obligation. Niger formally recognised the method as a national soil restoration approach in 2020. Farmer-managed natural regeneration restores Africa’s dry lands.

Both examples point at the same weakness in how we plant trees here. One environmental specialist put it plainly this year, noting that plantation drives in Pakistan focus on how many trees go into the ground rather than how many survive. He said that species selection mattered more than the count. The scale of that gap is documented elsewhere. Researchers at the Ethiopian Environment and Forest Research Institute found that without follow-up care, more than half of seedlings fail to establish.

Neem Yatra programme can become successful if survival, rather than just plantation numbers are monitored and published. By geo-tagging every sapling, then reporting what is still alive at twelve months and at thirty-six months, the effectiveness of the programme can be established. South Korea did this in 1973 — the Punjab Information Technology Board can do that today.

Another important factor is to plant the trees against the hazard map in areas where heat mortality, dust exposure and runoff are the worst. Detailed hazard mapping of the Punjab already exists with the Provincial Disaster Management Authority.

In order to enhance the initiative, a model that gives ownership of the trees to local communities should be explored. A tree in a government school or other public building, union council office, or on private land that generates some benefits for the community is more likely to be taken care of. Simply put, a tree survives when protecting it pays.

The Punjab does not need another record plantation drive: it needs trees that survive and are still standing 20 years down the road. Five thousand neem, properly sited and counted in terms of survival, would be a better start than any headline number we have produced so far.

Ahmed Ahsan is a development sector leader currently building AI compute and ecosystems at UET, Lahore, can be reached at linkedin.com/in/aaansari