SCOPE - Society for Conservation and Protection of Enviroment

We all share a common planet to live. This planet is facing unprecedented environmental challenges in the form of climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and desertification. The reason of this catastrophic situation is our unsustainable consumption and production patterns, lack of environmental awareness, lacks of political will to protect it and above all a state of inertia, which is leading us towards a environmental irreversible disaster. Drought and desertification are posing serious threats to poor and marginalized dryland areas of the world where about 1 billion people dwell, and whose livelihood is at serious risk.

Pakistan is predominantly a dryland country, where most of the rural masses live in marginal dryland areas. These people have no access to government facilities, infrastructure, health, education facilities, credit and other amenities. SCOPE believes that in order to combat desertification and environmental degradation in our fragile dryland ecosystem areas, local community needs to be involved in mitigation measures such as maintaining forests and rangelands, promoting sustainable agriculture and conserve water.

The rapidly deteriorating environment has forced many concerned civil groups around the world to come forward and organize themselves to put a struggle against environmental degradation.

Society for Conservation and Protection of Environment (SCOPE) is a like minded group of environmental activists and professionals founded in 1988.

SCOPE is registered under Societies Registration Act 1860, as a non-governmental organization (NGO), with registration number KAR 1735 of 1990. SCOPE is registered by Income Tax Department as an NGO, under Income Tax Ordinance 2001, and donations received by it are tax exempted.

SCOPE's motto is "Think Globally, Act locally" which depicts that although environmental problem may be of global in nature but their implications are felt at very local level and most of them are to be dealt at local level through participatory approaches.

SCOPE is an active NGO, associated with the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), which is trying to demonstrate that desertification can be combated by adopting participatory natural resources management (NRM) approaches. Such demonstrations are established in southern districts of Sindh province, which needed to be supported by the Government and other support organizations.

SCOPE conceptually follows the "Agenda 21", which is an action plan to achieve goal of sustainable development. Agenda 21 was adopted at the United Nations Conference on Environment and development (UNCED). SCOPE is in the consultative status of the high profile UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). SCOPE has been associated with the UNCED held at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and since then it has been associated with different environmental bodies and conventions of the UN such as Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), UN Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD), UN Environment Programme (UNEP), Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), and Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), UN Conference on Human Settlement (HABITAT), and World Social Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD).

UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has particularly been the prime focus of SCOPE since 1993, as this convention addresses poverty and environmental issues in the marginal drylands. Almost all of SCOPE programmes revolves around UNCCD and are implemented in dryland ecological zones of Tharparkar, Sindh Kohistan and Sindh Coastal areas.