Pakistan needs global support to make up for massive climate losses, says Indian academic

Pakistan needs robust support from the international community to help it adopt climate-resilient systems for industrial growth and compensation for massive losses and damages it recently suffered due to floods and other devastating calamities.

This was one of the main recommendations by Dr Partha Sen, professor emeritus at the Delhi School of Economics, who spoke from India via the live video link at the 23rd Hamza Alavi distinguished lecture.

The Irtiqa Institute of Social Sciences conducted the event at Szabist on Monday. The lecture was titled “Climate change in a historical setting and the countries of the Global South: Where are the equity considerations?”.

The senior academic from India said Pakistan needed extraordinary support from the developed countries to make up for its widespread damages due to the climate emergency because of the country’s minimal contribution to the global carbon footprint.

He said Pakistan had been gravely affected by climate emergencies including recurring devastating floods, erosion of its coastal belt, and fast melting of glaciers in the north not owing to its own carbon emissions but due to the issue of global warming caused by the developed economies.

Prof Sen told the audience that the recently concluded UN Annual Environment Summit (COP-29) in Baku, Azerbaijan, was a disappointment for developing countries like Pakistan that had been gravely affected by the climate emergency. The UN Annual Conference, however, had started making progress in the right direction, he added.

He informed the audience that as per the latest scientific estimates, the international fraternity should commit USD1 trillion to compensate for the losses in the third-world countries due to the climate catastrophe but the recent UN climate conference agreed to pay just USD 300 billion for this vital cause, which was even less than one-third of the actual requirement.

He added that even the limited funds committed by the international community would not be disbursed instantly. He viewed that financial support extended by the developed countries as compensation for climate-related losses in the third world should not be paid in the form of interest-bearing loans otherwise disbursed by international lending agencies.

The senior professor of economics from India told the audience that the global phenomenon of unequal distribution of wealth and income had a lot to do with the problem of climate change. He emphasised that industrialised nations in the developed world should be held fully accountable for the climate catastrophe caused in the lesser-developing countries due to their massive carbon footprint.

Prof Sen said the exploitative economic tendencies shown by the industrialised countries since the era of colonialism were one of the major causes of the global issue of climate catastrophe. He said the developed countries had started releasing unchecked quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since the commencement of the industrial revolution. He said the methane emissions by the developed countries were another major factor responsible for the fast deterioration in the global environment. He said that by the middle of the 18th century, harmful hydrocarbon emissions by the colonial powers had reached alarming proportions.

Prof Sen informed the audience that fast-changing weather patterns in the Indo-Pakistan Sub-Continent and recurring heavy floods were the clear signs of the deadly phenomenon of climate change that could not be scientifically denied. He added that climate change caused unusual rain patterns in India and the devastating floods of 2022 in Pakistan.

At the outset of his lecture, the Indian academic underlined the need for allowing greater people-to-people contacts between India and Pakistan to hold useful scholarly and intellectual discussions on regional and common issues.

Dr Tahira S Khan, visiting faculty member of the Columbia University in New York, chaired the session. In her remarks, she said she wished Prof Sen were allowed to come to Pakistan to deliver his useful lecture in person under a relaxed regime promoting such visits of scholars and academics between the two neighbouring countries.