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Pakistan: Provinces Pledge To Join The Federal Government In The Fight Against Climate Change

June 22, 2015 at 1:56 pm | News Desk

Under an agreement reached among provinces and federal government at a high-level national meeting on National Climate Change Policy Implementation Committee (NCCPIC), each of Pakistan’s five provinces will create its own committee to take action on climate change policy and report back by May 5 on how they intend to take action on both reducing climate-changing emissions and supporting adaptation to climate change impacts.

It was also agreed during the meeting that climate change sections also would be established in the federal planning commission and provincial planning and development (P&D) departments for smooth coordination among the federal and provincial governments on climate change and climate funding.
“Such plans will be forwarded to the recently established international Green Climate Fund, in an effort to win funding to implement them,” said Senator Mushahidullah Khan, federal minister for climate change, who chaired the NCCPIC meeting on April 23.

Governments of all five provinces and Pakistan-administered Azad Jammu & Kashmir (AJK) at the meeting pledged to support federal climate change ministry in implementation of the climate change policy.
The country passed in 2012 a national climate change policy (NCCP) to deal with this issue, but it remained unimplemented for different reasons including political crises and war against terror. However, there is now a push at the federal government level to try to get regions to respond.

The NCCP contains some 120 policy actions for climate change mitigation and adaptation.
The representatives of provincial governments also agreed to put in place the policy actions, particularly those, which are of immediate nature concerning water conservation, flood-resilient infrastructure and climate-resilient crop varieties.
They also agreed to report to the climate change ministry their respective progress on the policy actions time to time and spell out financing mechanism required for implementation of the policy actions by May 23.
Nazar Shah, forest secretary of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan’s northwest , highlights unprecedented importance of the establishment of the climate change sections in provinces, saying these are inevitable for close, effective and unhampered collaboration among the provincial and federal government.

“We would, surely, strive to set up such section and other provinces should do the same,” Shah pledged.
Sardard Adul Nabi, Senior Chief (Energy) at Sindh provincial Planning & Development Department said the entire country is reeling under negative impacts of rapidly changing weather patterns, which have become highly erratic.
“However, no provincial government can afford to ignore such weather patterns and need to make all socio-economic sectors adaptive to them,” he argued and added, “Sindh, a lower riparian province, is highly vulnerable to riverine floods and sea-level rise.”

Senator Mushahidullah Khan told this scribe on the sidelines of the meeting that the federal government alone cannot cope with vagaries of climate change. All provincial governments and AJ&K government have to be on the same page in the fight against climate change.
“Since all the actions proposed in the NCCP will have to be implemented in the provinces, the provincial governments need to ‘act now’ in the light of the policy recommendations of the NCCP,” he argued. Mr. Khan took charge of the climate change ministry this year on February 8.
Implementation Framework
The ministry has also prepared the Framework for Implementation of Climate Change Policy (FICCP), an important strategic roadmap document for NCCP implementation.

The document has been hammered out (Nov. 2013) in consultation with all governmental and non-governmental stakeholders in the country.

FICCP comprises 50 objectives 136 strategies, 747 actions (short, medium and long term) and four different timelines, which have been prepared in a meticulous and careful manner.

“The climate actions proposed in the FICCP, to be taken by the provinces, will make different socio-economic sectors – particularly water, agriculture & livestock, forestry, energy, transport, industry and urban planning – climate-resilient,” says Arif Ahmed Khan, federal climate change secretary.

The secretary said further that these sectors are at the centre-stage of sustainable development, which cannot be achieved as long as these critical sectors remain vulnerable to climate change effects.
Independent climate experts, scientists and researchers say that any collaboration among Pakistan’s provincial with federal government for expediting implementation process of the country’s NCCP would help augment the country’s climate-resilience.

Since water, agriculture, energy and public infrastructure sectors are particularly vulnerable to debilitating impacts of climate change, the provincial and federal governments need to collaborate to make these vital sectors adaptive to these effects, to achieve water, food and agriculture security, stressed Muhammad Mohsin Iqbal, who heads agriculture research section at the state-owned Global Change Impact Study Centre (GCISC) in Islamabad. He is one of the authors of the IPCC AR5.
Sughra Tunio is development science and climate change Journalist.

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Senator Mushahidullah Khan, federal minister for climate change, chairs a high-level first meeting of the National Climate Change Policy Implementation Committee in the Committee Room of the Federal Ministry of Climate Change on April 23, 2015.

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Senator Mushahidullah Khan, federal minister for climate change, chairs a high-level first meeting of the National Climate Change Policy Implementation Committee in the Committee Room of the Federal Ministry of Climate Change on April 23, 2015.

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Senator Mushahidullah Khan, federal minister for climate change, chairs a high-level first meeting of the National Climate Change Policy Implementation Committee in the Committee Room of the Federal Ministry of Climate Change on April 23, 2015.

By
Sughra Tunio

News Desk

Economic Affairs Editor

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