Pakistan, April 25 -- The ruling elite wants to engineer a city of skyscrapers and glitzy parks on the shoulders of the Margalla Hills. Alarmed by the scale of tree felling and land clearing across the capital, the World Wide Fund for Nature?Pakistan has warned that a 1,000?kanal park and a string of five?star hotels at the foothills of the National Park would pose "potentially irreversible" damage to a landscape that serves as the capital's lungs and water filter.

The Margallas are home to rare birds and mammals and store the groundwater that keeps the city alive. Clearing forests here fragments habitats, disrupts wildlife corridors and wrecks services like groundwater recharge. Pakistan's natural forests already cover only about five p...