Berlin Climate Moot: Pakistan asks for a bold reset of the global climate agenda

ISLAMABAD: At the Petersburg Dialogue on multilateral climate negotiations, Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman asked for a clear re-set of the global climate agenda, for equitable resourcing of change, new goals, and an accelerated pace of operationalisation of pledges made as well new ambitions that address the needs of developing countries before the crucial COP 27 in November in Egypt.

Sherry Rehman was leading the country delegation comprised of Asif Haider Shah, Secretary MoCC, Mujtaba, Senior Joint Secretary, Ms Sayyeda Hadika Jamshed, Climate Change Policy Specialist and Dr Saima, Director MoCC.

Taking the floor at the ministerial dialogue co-hosted by Germany and Egypt Sherry Rehman said, “We meet here today at a crucial inflection point in global negotiations on pace and scale of climate change. She said Pakistan’s extreme vulnerability to accelerated climate induced events has exposed it to a multitude of risks.

She said these range from unprecedented heat waves, forest fires, glacial lake outburst floods, (GLOF events) fast-approaching water scarcity (annual water availability level below 1000 cubic meters) along with torrential monsoon flooding, growing desertification and draughts (for the past two years as per the UNCCD Report,), and rising sea levels.

She said all these changes have made Pakistan the ground zero of climate catastrophe where life on earth, water and under-water has been impacted at exponential levels, making the country a perfect example of all the disasters that come with climate stress. “Damage to agricultural productivity, livelihoods, human health and economic stability have led to irreversible impacts including massive internal displacements as well as GDP losses that go as high as 9.1% (UNESCAP),” she said.

She said while mitigation has been foundational to the earlier COP agendas, and Pakistan has attempted to meet its articulated ambitions, what we have not seen until today at the multilateral level is a concerted acknowledgement of loss and damage as a core agenda.

She said the Global South is looking now for a robust financial mechanism to actualise its goals on the ground, where a transfer of resources goes beyond pledges and promises. In fact, she said, it is troubling to countries like us that so far pledges for loss and damage compensation have also not been made at all.

She said this is either an egregious oversight, or worse, an index of the climate injustice that is at play in a world where countries that emit less than 1% of GHGs are expected to not just fulfil their commitments on their own, but also make an unfinanced energy transition, or pledge to net zero goals without the means for implementation of such transformational shifts.

Secondly, she said given that we now agree that notwithstanding mitigation, which is not a goal to be lost sight of, adaptation finance now also needs to be front and centre, with a serious scaling up of the financial envelope for the same at the COP 27 agenda. She said it will also strip such convening of crucial consensus needed for fixing our broken planet in the time that is needed.

Thirdly, Senator Sherry Rehman said time is critical to the entire equation we model our global projections on, and this pace of change, of adherence to articulated ambitions, totally misses the mark where the planet can remain habitable.

The minister for Climate Change said this crisis is existential, and if not addressed equitably, history will remember this as-modernity’s false promise; if we lose this opportunity to fix the broken climate system we will have tragically failed our future and the survival of both our planet and the human race. “We must hope for a better future, but hope is not a plan. Global pledges must go further, and they must translate into planning and accessible funding pipelines for operationalising our joint goals,” she said.