SWAT: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Environmental Protection Agency (KP-EPA) director general Mohammad Anwar Khan said here on Saturday that the government had been paying special attention to environmental and climate change issues in the province and is spending billions of rupees on climate change adaptation and mitigation, which would bring ample sustainability in the area.

He was speaking at a training workshop on climate change adaptation action plan held here in Mingora. The workshop was organised by the Forest, Environment and Wildlife Department, KP, in collaboration with UNDP under the Glof-II project.

Apart from civil society members, officials of line departments of the district, including Upper Swat Development Authority, agriculture, forest, PDMA, education, wildlife and EPA, participated in the session.

The workshop was held to train the officials of line departments on a new climate change policy and action plan. It was felt that there was a need for creating awareness in the community of climate challenges to reduce pollution and make sustainable development.

The EPA DG said that for the past 20 years Pakistan had ranked among the top 10 most vulnerable countries on the climate risk index, with 10,000 fatalities due to climate-related disasters.

“The financial losses amounted to about $4 billion from 173 extreme weather events occurred so far,” he said, adding in the glacial melting between 1999 to 2018 Pakistan ranked fifth among the countries affected by extreme weather.

Mr Anwar said Pakistan was once a water affluent country, but it was moving fast to a water stressed country.

“In 1947, Pakistan’s per capita water availability was 5,000 cubic meters, which has decreased to around 1,000 cubic meters, and is projected to drop to 800 cubic meters per capita by 2025,” he said.

He said the government was aware of climate change threats and had started projects to control the negative impacts in future.

“The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government formulated a provincial climate change policy in 2017 and has updated it in 2022,” he said.

Published in Dawn, October 9th, 2022