Clean drinking water project: Aab-e-Pak Authority to get $20m carbon credits

LAHORE: In a first of its kind agreement with an international organisation, Punjab Aab-e-Pak Authority (PAPA) will get carbon credits amounting to $20 million.

Environmentalists said carbon credits, also known as carbon offsets, are permits that allow an owner to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. They said one credit permits the emission of one ton of carbon dioxide or the equivalent in other greenhouse gases. The carbon credit was half of a so-called cap-and-trade programme.

Further elaborating, environmentalists said the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and the Paris Agreement of 2015 were international accords that laid out international CO2 emissions goals and were ratified by most of the world nations.

They said with these new regulations in force, everyone was finding ways to reduce their carbon footprint and this lead to the establishment of carbon markets.

In Punjab, PAPA became the first government agency to sign Memorandum of Agreement (MoU) with Project Team ATR Inc (headquartered in Busan, the Republic of Korea), for safe drinking water programme, under coordination of UN-Habitat. PAPA CEO Syed Zahid Aziz while talking to The News said under the cooperation, UN-Habitat will provide grant assistance of up to $20 million, with no financial liability on Punjab government.

“Key interventions of this agreement are that the ATR and UN-Habitat will install 400 new solarized water filtration plants (WFPs) with the capacity of 2,000 litre per hour and 10 years O&M of these plants,” Zahid Aziz revealed, adding the new plants will be established in Lahore and Faisalabad.

Besides the new plants, under the MoU, the ATR and UN-Habitat will also bear the O&M for 10 years of already 1,000 WFPs installed all over Punjab by PAPA, he said and maintained that the agreement also included solarisation and installation of SCADA system at these 1,000 already installed plants.

The said project has been cleared in the 14th meeting of Provincial External Financing Assessment Committee (PEFAC) held on 06.02.2024 under the Chairmanship of Secretary P&D Board / Chairman PEFAC while the Ministry of Economic Affairs Islamabad has also issued no objection on the proposed project.

“The first component of the project will implement sustainable low carbon urban development with a focus on improving the living environment in slums and Katchi Abadi areas of Lahore and Faisalabad,” Zahid Aziz said.

Talking about the second component, he said currently the plants installed by PAPA have a massive total connected electricity load, which was resulting in a very high electricity utility bills and an expensive O&M leading to the government subsidising the share of its OPEX. Under the project, the government will not only save the amount of subsidy being spent on the O&M of 1000 WFPs, but will also benefit from efficient control, safety, monitoring, and maintenance of usage records through the installation of the SCADA monitoring systems, he revealed.

Meanwhile, environmentalists said there were a number of key areas like town and urban planning, infrastructure development, service provision, waste management, energy provisioning and transportation in which a government or any of its organisations can get carbon credits from the UN agencies as well as from international markets, which deals in carbon credit.

They said the main objective of this tool was to provide environmental, planning and development with clear guidance on how to develop Clean Development Mechanism and Verified Emission Reduction projects.

A report of an international body revealed that the effects of urbanisation and climate change were converging in dangerous ways and global warming was likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052, and approximately 3°C in 2100 based on current national government commitments, which will have disastrous impacts on cities.

The most affected populations of climate change were the urban poor i.e. slum dwellers in developing countries who tend to live along river banks, on hillsides and slopes prone to landslides, near polluted grounds, on decertified land, in unstable structures vulnerable to earthquakes, and along waterfronts in coastal areas, the report said.

It added the urban poor were indeed increasingly vulnerable and more than 1 billion people who live in slums and informal settlements were highly vulnerable to climate change.

Despite these risks, many cities have not yet addressed climate change, it said, adding the reasons included a lack of relevant policies and action plans such as existence of regulations on urban planning and environment which have not been adjusted to manage climate change, slow response to climate disasters due to lack of capacity and resources, and lack of public awareness on climate variability and climate change-induced hazard mitigation.

PAPA CEO Syed Zahid Aziz concluded that as a whole, the above mentioned project will result in sustainable provision of clean drinking water to approximately 8 million people with no financial liability on the Punjab government.