The Capital Development Authority (CDA) has imposed a fine of Rs 50,000 per tree on a private builder for cutting trees and has asked him to compensate the heavy loss to the environment by planting the same number of trees.

Earlier, Prime Minister’s Task force on Islamabad Chairman Faisal Sakhi Butt took serious notice of the chopping of 40-year-old trees by the builder and had directed the CDA to take stern action against him.

Autsho, Lhuentse: A forest fire that started from the banks of Kurichu at Autsho in Lhuentse has razed, over the weekend, more than 700 acres of pine forest, which is abundantly covered with lemon grass.

According to eyewitnesses, the fire started when a rolling boulder at Autsho-Ladrong farm road construction site hit a tree, which caused several other stones to roll off. The sparks that flew when the stones rubbed against each other started the fire.

Wildfires scorched Tennessee on Wednesday as blazes in New Jersey and on New York's Long Island were largely brought under control and some were investigated as possible arson.

In the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, a wildfire raged on Wednesday, having already destroyed four buildings with 48 vacation condominiums since it began on Tuesday morning.

The fires follow an unusually dry winter and what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said was the warmest March in the contiguous United States since records began in 1895.

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper suspended prescribed burns used to mitigate fire danger on Wednesday after a controlled blaze apparently ignited a wildfire west of Denver that killed an elderly couple and destroyed some two dozen homes.

"Through this suspension, we intend to make sure that we have the procedures and protocols in place so that prescribed fire conditions and management requirements are understood and strictly followed," Hickenlooper said in a statement.

As many as 7,500 trees will be axed to pave the way for the 775 MW Luhri Hydroelectric Project being constructed by the public sector Satluj Jal Vidyut Nigam on the Sutlej near Nirath downstream Rampur.

There have been periodic droughts in the American southwest for millenia. A new study at the UA's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research has revealed a previously unknown multi-decade drought period in the second century A.D which was in the middle of the Roman era. The findings give further evidence that extended periods of aridity have occurred at intervals throughout our past. Almost nine hundred years ago, in the mid-12th century, there was a better known multi-decade drought in the southwestern US made locally famous by the Anasazi.

The trees spanning many of the mountainsides of western Montana glow an earthy red, like a broadleaf forest at the beginning of autumn.

But these trees are not supposed to turn red. They are evergreens, falling victim to beetles that used to be controlled in part by bitterly cold winters. As the climate warms, scientists say, that control is no longer happening.

Across millions of acres, the pines of the northern and central Rockies are dying, just one among many types of forests that are showing signs of distress these days.

DuPont was ordered by the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday to stop selling and recall its Imprelis herbicide, following thousands of complaints that the treatment kills trees.

The order came after the EPA in June began getting reports from state agencies of damage to evergreens linked to Imprelis, which DuPont had marketed to control weeds in recreational areas such as golf courses and commercial properties such as sod farms.

Carbon absorbation capacity of tree species, particularly pine, seems to have decreased in mid Himalayan zones of Uttrakhand following ban on green felling .