Pakistan Needs Its Own Report Card Before COP29

It is that time in the development world’s cycle where the conferences on climate change are beefed up and loads of consultations and preconference meetings have emerged to discuss and analyse the way forward. COP29 is around the corner in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November.

For Pakistan, much like its politics, it is a series of the same, over and over again, with very little change in the conversations’ scope. Once again, the emphasis is on how much Pakistan is owed from the international community for global warming impact. That is to say, how and to what extent can Pakistan tap into the financial arrangement promised in the last COP in Egypt. That is all.

There is no accountability for local actions, no report card on Pakistan’s investment in resilience in 2023-2024, and no effective lobbying strategy to enforce or demand that the federal government and its shadow policymakers actually implement the necessary financial shifts towards agreed aims and changes for mitigation measures and resilience of Pakistani citizens.

At the federal and provincial levels, the governments must change building laws to encourage solarisation of all construction – public and private

Let me suggest some concrete initiatives which will alter the lives of the majority of the poor and vulnerable Pakistani citizens and will build towards their resilience against climate-induced vulnerabilities – otherwise called adaptation in development parlance.

1. Every village and district of Pakistan must move towards renewable energy generation and local management arrangements. This single intervention will insure many mitigation measures, against multiple crises. KP has successfully shown in Swat, Naran and Chitral how to harness hydel power generation. It has become self-sufficient, and in fact, it is now in the next stage of devising technical expertise and transparency with challenges related to human resource capacities at the very localised level.
2. This segues with the critical need to provide accelerated literacy programs at every village in Pakistan to ensure that the population, young and old, are functional citizens. Without moving the population towards being able to help itself and contribute towards their own welfare and their broader community, Pakistan will continue to increase the burden of an unimaginably vulnerable, angry populous. This is the building block of any and all resilience development programmes in Pakistan, and it is the cornerstone of transforming Pakistan from its current dangerously beleaguered state towards a nation with a future. It is the way towards a safer future and securer society.
3. At the federal and provincial levels, the governments must also change the building laws to encourage solarisation of all construction – public and private. This would mean changing their current anti-solar policies that are meant to please the construction and traditional energy producers’ lobbies. The excessive duties on solar panels, batteries and materials must go and instead the state should give tax incentives to build only with solar. Furthermore, all construction in Pakistan whether private public or corporate must become green, with water conservation systems, heat insulation and management to lower bills and conserve, use renewable materials, and adapt conservation designs and materials. Until there is a local industry feeding this sector and catering to all the necessary requirements, the government should not prevent imports, rather ensure an enabling environment.
4. Develop a functional modern waste management system at every village level, with recycling as a national habit, and moving towards natural alternative materials to replace cotton for the garment and agricultural sector. These are key shifts in transforming the entire physical social and health infrastructures of Pakistan. The linkage with plastic waste and the hygiene health is well documented, aside from the pollution of waters, glaciers, rivers and ocean. What we done to our Indus river and what the ocean side and port areas of Sindh is all a horror story: all we see is sewerage and every imaginable kind of filth. The fisherfolk have stated they have to go miles into the ocean to fish, where there was aplenty just a generation ago. The sewerage systems are non-existent in most cities and completely absent in most towns and villages. in a country with children picking up garbage why is there no recycling industry, or recycled materials industry or energy created from garbage. The science and technology are there, and just need to be utilised. These failures to reach out for low-hanging fruit are stark markers of governance failures; a mirror of the priorities of those in power who continue to live off the state for free while the teeming millions perish in increasingly dangerous environments.
5. The contradictory policy of planting and cementing has to come an end. On one hand, Pakistan boasts of tree-planting drives while the construction industry grows exponentially without oversight. They continue to encroach on shrinking green areas. Pakistan’s population is growing at a rate which is unsustainable, and the land required for supporting the income of local families is not growing. The rationale for housing societies has not been made within an environment protection plan, whether from pollution, clean air, wildlife protection or heat generation. Policies are not cross-checked by considering their impact on an environmental change assessment. The random mafia-driven policymaking must stop, and a pro-citizen framework must be adopted for collective welfare.

The above concrete actions are suggestions for the agenda of Pakistan’s environmental, climate change and development champions. The pre-COP discussions on how to improve the welfare of Pakistan in any of the sectors are all linked to the above areas of vulnerabilities.

A report card would benefit and feed Pakistan’s COP29 pre-conference consultations. We need to begin to move from talk to actions – locally!