Viable policy framework stressed for climate resilience

Islamabad : The need for a viable policy framework to boost climate resilience of the country’s urban areas against climate change-caused natural disasters was emphasised by experts during the National Inception Workshop on Climate-Resilient Urban Settlement here on Thursday.

According to them, heatwaves and flooding are major threats to the very sustainability of the cities irrespective of their sizes. Cities can be disaster-resilient only through the capacity-building of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within these cities to survive, adapt and grow no matter what type of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience.

The event was organised by the Ministry of Climate Change in collaboration with UN-Habitat, provincial and federal governments, and non-governmental organisations. Addressing the event as a keynote speaker, climate change secretary Naheed Shah Durrani said the government had established a major initiative, Climate-Resilient Urban Settlements in Pakistan, to develop a policy framework and initiate infrastructural and non-infrastructural measures to boost the resilience of urban areas of the country against recurring and intensifying natural disasters.

She said Pakistan’s rate of urbanisation had been ranked highest among South Asia, where over 36.4 percent of the country’s the population lived in urban areas and that the UN Populations Division said nearly half of the country’s population would be living in cities by 2025.

The secretary said around 50 per cent of the populations in urban areas of the country were settled in informal settlements, which were characterized by heightened levels of climate vulnerability and lack of disaster-proof infrastructure facilities.

She said the uncontrolled urban growth and lifestyle changes had led to change in increased consumption of energy, domestic transportation and fuel, contributing to both heightened level of local air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and land pollution, specifically that arising from the cities’ wastewater disposal and solid waste management.

The secretary said it was a major challenge to control haphazard and unplanned growth of urban settlements to reduce the vulnerability of cities to disasters.

She said among the issues hampering efforts to achieve goals of urban resilience were a lack of coordinated approach in urban planning and development and weak control on growth of human settlements, limited implementation and management capacity of municipal governments, absence of an efficient institutional mechanism to plan and manage urban development, priority conflicts among development authorities and local governments and private developers.

The secretary said the ministry had established a climate-resilient urban human settlements unit to cope with these challenges by boosting coordination and cooperation between federal and provincial governments as well as relevant non-governmental stakeholders for achieving the environmentally-sustainable urban and climate-resilient development and human settlements.

Also in attendance was UN-Habitat’s Country Manager in Pakistan Jawed Ali Khan, who lauded the federal government’s efforts towards making the country’s cities and dwellers climate-resilient through enhanced budgetary allocations, initiation of work for the development of policy framework to protect urban areas from climate change, capacity-building of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within these cities to survive, adapt, and grow.

Highlighting the importance of overall public awareness for effective climate action in cities, climate change ministry’s deputy director (advocacy) Muhammad Saleem Shaikh said sensitisation of policymakers, government officials, opinion leaders, and people to the challenges of climate change facing urban areas and residents were vital to effective overall policy response and preparedness for achieving the goals of climate resilience in urban areas. He said there was a general lack of awareness among policymakers, political leaders, and the public about urban climate adaptation solutions compared to urban planners or designers and urban climate experts, citizens and politicians are less aware than urban planners/designers and climate experts.

“Media campaigns for public awareness of the threats of the urban areas’ vulnerability to climate change disasters, benefits and good practice projects can prove the most effective in raising awareness and invoking effective response to making urban areas safe from impacts of climate change and environmentally-sustainable,” he said.

Earlier, the Climate-Resilient Urban Settlements Unit Director Muhammad Azeem said the unit would be responsible to take integrated steps to conduct an in-depth policy and planning research to identify the urbanization challenges and proposes timely measures for making our cities climate-resilient.