PAKISTAN’S climate change policy whose draft took more than a year to be readied is now under print and may be presented to the federal cabinet for approval in a few weeks. The draft will unveil an action plan to mitigate adverse effects of extreme weather events as witnessed in 2010 and again in 2011 and likely to face more such happenings in the years to come.
The subject is partially covered by Pakistan Environmental Protection Act 1997 and the National Environment Policy, 2005, but they have proved to be ineffective for lack of implementation of the suggested measures. A high-level committee appointed by the prime minister to coordinate actions on climate change has failed to meet even once in the past three years.
How far the climate change policy will succeed in motivating the bureaucracy to meet the challenge is difficult to foresee. But the magnitude of the challenge — rise in temperatures, frequency of heavy rains and floods, large-scale damages to property and infrastructure, rehabilitation of climate refugees and losses in agricultural output — is too enormous that it hardly provides any room for lethargy, inefficiency and corrupt practices on the part of relevant authorities.
The draft will address the issues of adaptation to the changes in climate and their impact on sectors such as irrigation, energy, crop patterns, clean water, transport, disaster management and capacity building of several departments. Besides, people in Pakistan will have to be prepared to learn to live and cope with most of the changes in climate in the future.
Our rivers are mainly fed by the Hindukush-Karakoram-Himalayan glaciers that are likely to melt faster due to global warming. In the 2010 floods, the Indus River inundated an area of 100,000 square kilometres while another 60,000 square kilometers was flooded by other rivers such as the Kabul and the Swat, according to the National Disaster Management Authority. Pakistan’s greenhouse gas emissions were estimated at 309 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2008. In other words, the country contributes 0.8 per cent of the total global emissions.
Maplecroft, a British risk assessment consultancy, that ranks countries by their expected climate vulnerability over the next 30 years, counts Pakistan in the 20 most climate-vulnerable countries worldwide.
An ActionAid research report says that Bangladesh is more vulnerable than its neighbours such as India, Pakistan and Nepal, who ranked 7, 14 and 16 respectively.
Bangladesh, among 28 developing countries, ranked fifth as the most vulnerable to climate change and hunger. But, the report also said, that Bangladesh is better prepared to face the challenges than its neighbours.
Malik Amin Aslam Khan, a former minister of state for environment, is of the view that estimating the actual economic costs of adaptation, “is still a nascent concept at the global level, with a plethora of techniques floating around but none accepted as the norm.”
However, there is a consensus that impact costs for the South Asian region will be very high and that the infrastructure sector would be the most affected by climate change.
Writing in a local newspaper in October, he said, “it comes as no surprise that cost estimates for bearing the brunt of future climate impacts are in the range of $6 to $14 billion per year for Pakistan over the next 40 years” as suggested by a UN sponsored study.
And this figure, in cumulative terms, will rise with the passage of time as adaptation becomes more expensive and the country confronts unavoidable damages. Three separate forecasting models based on GDP percentages, per capita estimations and using past disaster costs and frequency have been used to deduce this range.
Malik exhorts Pakistani policymakers to face the reality that “the country cannot run away from the effects of a changing climate.” In the past 40 years, nine out of the top ten natural disasters in Pakistan have been climate-triggered which shows the magnitude of the challenge. Therefore, events like heavy rains, flash floods, diseases and rising tempratures are all “an inevitable future reality forced upon Pakistan by the trends of global warming.”
But Pakistan, he regrets, has gone into “a reverse mode” on these fronts, and at the worst possible time as is evident from the fact that 14 out of 18 environmental subjects that were chosen for devolution have actually been given to other federal ministries.
In the case of climate change, policy and negotiations have been handed over to the ministry of planning, while the subject of emissions trading has been allotted to the ministry of water and power.
Meanwhile, scientists have claimed in the first authoritative confirmation of the effects of climate change on the region that glaciers in the Himalayas have shrunk by as much as a fifth in just 30 years. The findings, published in three reports by the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), show Nepal’s glaciers have shrunk by 21 per cent and Bhutan’s by 22 per cent over 30 years.
The reports follow a discredited announcement by scientists in 2007 that the region’s glaciers would be gone by 2035. These reports say that 10 glaciers which were surveyed in the region are all shrinking, with a marked acceleration in loss of ice between 2002 and 2005. Another study found a significant reduction in snow cover across the region in the last decade.
These reports provide a new baseline and location-specific information for understanding climate change in one of the most vulnerable ecosystemsin the world, according to Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Pakistan feels seriously concerned that several glaciers situated in Indian-administered Kashmir are shrinking, resulting in a recession in the levels of water that flow in rivers originating from these glaciers. As a result, agriculture has been badly affected while availability of water for drinking and other domestic purposes is also on decrease. Pakistan’s water availability has decreased to 1,200 cubic meters per person from 5,000 cubic meters in 1947 and is forecast to drop to 800 cubic meters by 2020.
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