LAHORE: As climate change and climate financing are buzzwords, experts at a ThinkFest session on “Tapping climate change finance opportunities for Pakistan” spoke about building capacity for stakeholders to first tap and then make effective use of funds to improve the climate.

The importance of local ownership and solutions to funding climate change was stressed by Mahesh Mishra, the head of the Prosperity and Economic Growth Team at the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office, British High Commission, Islamabad.

He termed the climate change narrative interesting and powerful the world over, and that developed countries were being asked to share the costs incurred by climate change-related eventualities. He said strong local leadership was essential for inventing locally contextualised solutions. About

unlocking international financing opportunities, he said there was a demand and supply issue as demand was higher while the supply was plagued by complex procedural layers. He said it was a fact that developing countries hardly got high-quality projects in terms of climate change.

David Reiner from the Cambridge University said we were living in an emerging market economy and the history of climate finance was growing with time. He reminded the session that billions of dollars were committed by the developed world at the Copenhagen Summit for carbon neutrality in 2019 but the funding inspiration of the international community was a political question. He said with international financing, very few countries had moved to meaningful energy conversion.

“Pakistan, devastated by climate-driven factors, should learn from South Africa and Indonesia for effective spending of climate funds and work on a cost-efficient system as Pakistan may encounter difficulties in replicating the developed world’s systems for implementing lower-cost urban technologies,” he suggested.

Abrar Chaudhry, from the Said Business School at the University of Oxford, stressed the need for breaking barriers in terms of climate funding. He said the million-dollar question was how to get funding and how to spend it. He said the solution was in international collaboration and understanding climate-related trends.

The government should speak to other governments, besides the NGOs and financial institutions as no single corridor was enough. Mr Chaudhry stressed the need for greater preparedness for big projects, saying that the world should know that Pakistan needed money quickly.

JS Bank’s Shezad Abdullah highlighted the bank’s journey focused on credit funding, its support for environmentally-friendly projects and green funding.

Climate expert Ali Habib and Ms Rasheeda from the Federal Finance Ministry also spoke.

Published in Dawn, January 15th, 2023