Dangerous climate

There has been good news in terms of Pakistan’s commitments on climate change. Last month, Pakistan became the 104th     country to ratify the climate change agreement reached in Paris this year. Two days ago, Pakistan and Iran reached an agreement to cooperate on the issue of climate change after a conference on climate change in the city of Marrakech in Morroco. These commitments seem to suggest that there are some in the higher echelons of government who feel that Pakistan is vulnerable to climate change and must be prepared for the volatile climate that the world is predicted to face in the coming future. Already, the current year is predicted to be warmer than any other recorded year. This record is being broken for the third straight year. Pakistan’s position is a particularly vulnerable one. It is ranked as the seventh most vulnerable country in the world in terms of climate change. In recent years, the country has been hit by frequent floods, heatwaves and drought and now the recent onset of dangerous smog across major chunks of Punjab.

The problem is that the verbal commitments have not been matched with actual initiatives on the ground. In the next decade, the country remains committed to adding a number of coal and furnace oil-based power plants to the national grid. This as the country continues to be affected by severe climate events. The importance of adding forest and tree cover across the country has not been stressed enough. If anything, tree cover has been on the decline due to environmentally disastrous development projects. There seems to have been no environmental impact assessment done for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor project, which promises to add thousands of trucks and fossil-fuel burning power plants to the already high levels of pollutants in our air. The Khyber Pakthunkhwa government’s tree plantation initiative and the Prime Minister’s Green Initiative are good steps in this direction but the actual funds allocated for these projects remain low. There have been enough warning signs for our policymakers to take climate change seriously. Each year at least one thousand people around the country die due to various climate-related disasters. Pakistan’s international commitments need to be followed by a comprehensive strategy on the ground. Creating greener urban spaces, reforestation, focusing on clean energy and reducing the amount of vehicles are some of the most obvious initiatives to be taken. These strategies go against the broader development paradigms that officials and businessmen believe in. The real challenge is for us to develop a policy for climate-friendly development. Only then can it reduce its vulnerability to the disasters it is already prone to.