Pakistan’s environment policies being recognised globally: PM

ISLAMABAD   –   Prime Minister Imran Khan said Sunday that the environment policies of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf are being recognised globally.

In a tweet, the prime minister said especially the government’s green recovery programme from the Covid 19 pandemic and climate action plan are being appreciated by the world.

According to World Economic Forum (WEF), in three ways Pakistan was building a greener future. Pakistan had pledged to source 60 percent of energy from renewables by 2030. It had cancelled coal projects replacing them with hydroelectric power.

It had created more than 85000 green jobs from plant care to protection of forests.       Pakistan is training 5000 young people to be nature guardians. Pakistan is investing in green space and had attracted $ 180 million in funding and it was working towards the creation of 15 new national parks. It is also launching a $ 500 million green Eurobond and will soon provide a monetary valuation of its green space making its worth clear and easier to protect. As a pandemic devastated the globe and climate change threatened our way of life, our relationship with nature demanded a rethink. One million animal and plant species worldwide were at risk of extinction. Investing in a nature positive economy could generate 395 million jobs by 2030, the WEF says.

Over the previous decade, the country has already witnessed extreme weather conditions including floods, extraordinarily heavy monsoon rains and heat waves. Even the country has contributed disproportionately less towards the emission of greenhouse gases, which is the largest human factor contributing towards climate change. The climate-induced migration has already begun in several areas of the country.

The Global Climate Risk Index 2020, issued by think tank Germanwatch, ranked Pakistan fifth on a list of countries most affected by planetary heating over the last two decades. Several projects have been initiated to address the looming threat of climate change, and the PTI government has emphasised heavily on tree plantation as part of its countermeasures.

The 10 billion tree tsunami project is one such initiative. The ambitious five-year tree-planting programme, which PM Imran launched in 2018, aims to counter the rising temperatures, flooding, droughts and other extreme weather in the country that scientists link to climate change.

According to Germanwatch, Pakistan reported more than 150 extreme weather events between 1999 and 2018 from floods to heat waves with total losses of $3.8 billion. Environmentalists have long pushed for reforestation as a way to help, saying forests help prevent flooding, stabilise rainfall, provide cool spaces, absorb heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions and protect biodiversity.

According to green group WWF, Pakistan is a “forest poor” country where trees cover less than 6% of the total area. Every year thousands of hectares of forest are destroyed, mainly as a result of unsustainable logging and clearing land for small-scale farming, the group said on its website.

With 7.5 billion rupees ($46 million) in funding, the 10 Billion Trees project aims to scale up the success of an earlier Billion Tree Tsunami in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, where the government has been planting trees since 2014.