ISLAMABAD: PPP Parliamentary Leader in the Senate Sherry Rehman has written a letter to Senate Chairman Sadiq Sanjrani requesting him to convene special sessions of the lower house to meet as committee of the whole to discuss key development crises hitting Pakistan, particularly its poor people.

“As members of the House of Federation, representing all the provinces of Pakistan as well as federal territories, it is incumbent on us to address these issues, invite expert advice in subject-panels, and build public literacy and policy advice to both the centre and the provinces on record,” Ms Rehman writes in the letter, a copy of which is available with Dawn.

In her letter, she has suggested discussions on the issues of “water deficit, climate change and population crisis.”

Ms Rehman said an acute water shortage was Pakistan’s frontline crisis. According to the United Nations, Pakistan will officially be water scarce by 2025.

She said while there was a general public discussion on adapting to urban water deficits, it had little or no resonance in policy agendas except at multilateral forums.

PPP lawmaker calls for extensive discussion on crucial issues like water deficit, climate change & population crisis

Ms Rehman said presently 26 districts of Sindh and Balochistan were suffering draught conditions.

“Our agricultural and industrial processes and priorities must change. At the same time, only 20 per cent of Pakistan has access to clean drinking water, while the rest consume fecal and industrially contaminated toxins. Lead and arsenic are now endemic to the Indus plain, while our ground water is rapidly drying up, with NASA warning that the Indus system is the second most overstressed system in the world,” she said.

Similarly, Ms Rehman said, climate change was transforming Pakistan. “In the last two years, Pakistan has moved from the world’s 7th most affected country to the 5th. Irrespective of our global carbon footprint, our vulnerability is high to rising temperatures and extreme weather.

This is not some abstract science, but a reality that impacts both citizens and state in escalating quantum,” she said, adding: “Last year Pakistan recorded the highest level of heat in the world in Jacobabad. Heat-induced deaths, droughts and crop-reductions are causing lower agricultural yields than a decade ago, while our glacial melt triggers flash-flooding combined with every monsoon.”

She said the Senate Climate Caucus had discussed many of these issues in detail, and suggested a broader discussion of them.

Given the provincial representation and enthusiasm to address joint challenges, the broad challenges and public stakes needed advocacy by the Senate, she said.

About the issue of population, she wrote the country’s population was arguably multiplying faster than its economic growth.

“Why a discussion on population growth matters is because its effect acts as a multiplier on other social and economic deficits, making it the single largest stress-inducer on creaky infrastructure, poor governance and diminishing resources,” she said, adding that since 1998, the country’s population had gone up by 57 per cent.

“These rates are completely unsustainable, because this suggests a doubling of our population by 2050. The impacts are huge. Given that 60pc of Pakistan is now food insecure, a state and community-driven agenda on the issue needs both public time and parliamentary attention,” she wrote while highlighting the seriousness and urgency of the matter.

“This is a very serious issue of critical public importance, and merits the Senate’s attention, reports and follow-ups with the provinces,” Senator Rehman said.

She said the Senate had both the convening power and political heft to put these issues at the centre of public agendas.

The federation must generate transparent data, political will and public policy to connect the dots across the provinces to overcome the governance crisis in Pakistan today, she said. Without such common goals connecting the resource and capacity dots to create resilience, Pakistan would not be in position to mitigate let alone manage the upcoming crises.

Published in Dawn, March 4th, 2020