limate change affects every aspect of our lives, from food security to health to energy to disaster vulnerabilities – the list goes on. It affects our economic decision-making when the federal government has to decide the fate of fossil fuel subsidies amidst sizzling heatwaves; it affects interprovincial relations when the provincial governments plead their cases for water allocation across the Indus basin; and it raises a big question mark on our level of disaster preparedness with drought in parts of Balochistan and glacial lake outburst floods in the Northern Areas.

Because climate change is transdisciplinary, multifaceted and touches everything, its challenges cannot be addressed through a single piece of policy prescription. Real world interventions do not always bring about the desired results as development policies cannot work in isolation from other policies, actors and factors in a country’s governance landscape.

They say that future lies in one’s actions. There is no denying that successive governments in Pakistan have taken many legal, institutional, and policy measures to reduce climate vulnerability and for disaster risk management (DRM). There is an abundance of policies in Pakistan to tackle climate change. These include the National Sustainable Development Strategy (2010), the National Climate Change Policy (CCP) (2012), the Framework for Implementation of CCP (2014), the National Power Policy (2013), the Vision 2025 (2014), the National Forest Policy (2010), the 10 Billion Tree Tsunami programme (2018), the Green Stimulus Package (2020), the National Electric Vehicle Policy (2020), and the Revised Nationally Determined Contributions (on climate change) (2021). The list can go on with the inclusion of many other standalone policy initiatives that directly or indirectly deal with climate change.

However, most of these policies were/ are under-resourced, operationalised (if at all) in silos and have lacked political ownership. The weakest link of our climate change policy prescription is where the actual implementation occurs i.e., at the district level. Most of the “top-down” policies simply don’t reach the districts. For instance, it was only after the Muree tourists’ tragedy last winter that the district disaster management authority (DDMA) was activated under a court direction.

We need the whole government to wholeheartedly implement all of policies to tackle climate change. This was one of the recommendations of the Climate Change Commission the Lahore High Court formed in 2015. I was a member of the commission. We observed a sheer lack of coordination within and across federating units on climate change issues.

For instance, we noted that implementation of climate change policy in agriculture sector alone required the collaborative efforts of almost two dozen federal and provincial ministries and departments (including agriculture, food, irrigation, forests, wildlife, environment, local government, planning and development, finance, industries, PDMA, DDMA etc at the provincial level, and National Food Security, Climate Change, and NDMA, etc at the federal level) that hardly talked to one another about climate change.

Forging the horizontal and vertical linkages among and across the administrative tiers is not the only challenge to successfully contain and adapt to climate change. According to the Pakistan@100, a report by the World Bank, “For a clean and green growth, which is resource-efficient and climate-resilient, Pakistan needs to go through a broad range of structural reforms (governance and institutions, structural transformation, competition policy, infrastructure, energy and so on) that lead to efficiency gains and a reduction in transaction costs. This transition has costs and it is crucial to implement it to improve systems without creating social issues and instability”.

The previous government’s five most important policy prescriptions on climate change include the 10 Billion Tree Tsunami programme; increasing protected areas for forests and mangroves supporting the terrestrial and marine ecosystems; moving towards electric vehicles and renewable energy options to cut carbon emissions; accessing climate finance mobilising various sources (through dept swap for nature in addition to benefitting from carbon markets including from the REDD+ facility, blue economy, etc.); and the focus on its green and clean Pakistan under which the projects relating to water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) were to be given importance.

Those initiatives (and many taken by the previous governments) did not yield the desired results due to chronic structural obstacles and some external issues.

Climate action (adaptation and mitigation efforts) needs money, which is why, under global arrangements, the world has pledged to contribute to the global climate fund for developing countries such as Pakistan. According to the Asian Development Bank, Pakistan requires climate finance worth $7-14 billion per year for climate adaptation. The good news is that G-7 leaders have renewed their pledge to contribute their outstanding sums of $100 billion for developing countries. The bad news is there is no definite timeline for these pledges to materialise.

The way forward on the global front is for the biggest emitters to agree on a “loss and damage” mechanism. They should pro-actively start paying their contributions to the climate fund, making it accessible to developing countries like Pakistan which bear the brunt of climate change. Delays by the developed world have already resulted in unprecedented global warming and will lead to a lose-lose situation.

On the domestic front, we have to break the dichotomy between growth and environment. It is not an either-or relationship. We must grow while taking care of our environment and remaining climate-smart. This requires an alignment of policies and procedures, and the government as a “whole” working toward a clean and green Pakistan. If that can be done, we can eradicate poverty and reduce our vulnerability to policy led climate disasters.

The writer heads the Sustainable Development Policy Institute. He tweets @abidsuleri