PM's aide calls for achieving low-carbon goals

Islamabad: Coordinator to the prime minister on climate change Romina Khurshid Alam on Friday urged the Pakistan Climate Change Authority to help ratchet up collaboration and cooperation among federal and provincial governmental organisations for achieving climate resilience, environmental sustainability, and low-carbon development goals.

“Driving Pakistan’s long-term sustainability and climate resilience actions is inevitable for ensuring that the country is better prepared to cope with the present and the future exacerbating impacts of climate change in various socio-economic sectors, particularly agriculture, water and energy,” Ms Alam told the second PCCA meeting here.

The PM’s aide said the lack of collaboration and cooperation among federal and provincial government organisations for implementing long-term and short-term national climate change policy measures for coping with the adverse fall-outs of climate change had increased the climate vulnerability of not only various socio-economic sectors but also infrastructure, and people's lives and livelihoods.

She, however, called upon the authority to strengthen its role and pace up efforts to bring together all federal and provincial organisations and national and international non-governmental organisations together through enhanced collaboration and cooperation for implementation of the national climate change policy for protecting the country and its people from aggravating climate risks, particularly floods, heatwaves, sea-level rise, shifting rainfall patterns and paced glacial melting.

Ms Alam also urged the authority to develop national programmes for climate adaptation for reducing the impacts of floods, droughts, and rising temperatures and mitigation programmes for cutting down greenhouse gas emissions through sustainable practices and renewable energy projects and actionable low-carbon development plans.

She emphasised the significance of raising public awareness of the effects of climate change and engaging communities in climate action. Climate change secretary Aisha Humera Chaudhry stressed the need for the unified approach at the national level to tackle climate challenges.

She said that recent devastating floods, heatwaves glacial melting due to rising temperatures in Pakistan’s north indicate that the country was grappling with increasingly adverse socio-economic consequences of climate change, positioning it among the most vulnerable countries globally.

“With a rising frequency of extreme weather events, particularly devastating floods, extended droughts, paced glacial melt, and rising temperatures, Pakistan’s socio-economic stability and environmental sustainability are under mounting threat,” she said.

Earlier, the PCCA members engaged in stock-taking of the status of the implementation of the national climate change policy measures and reviewed the progress of the policy mitigation and adaptation actions.

They also deliberated upon possible measures to boost coordination and cooperation across various federal and provincial government organisations, institutions and sectors, ensuring a unified approach to tackling climate challenges being faced by the country.