Saleem Shaikh
For Jamal Mujtaba, the news that the Pakistani government has prepared a plan to make Islamabad a model disaster-resilient city comes as a relief.
Resident of Pathan colony, a slum in Pakistan’s capital, Mujtaba has suffered losses to his home and livelihood. With that he faced a displacement caused by heavy rains that swell the streams emerging from foothills of scenic Margalla Hills to the north-west, triggering floods in the city. 
“For me any plan to make the city disaster-resilient is the need of the hour,” says Mujtaba.
On October 10, Pakistan’s Climate Change Division (CCD) unveiled a Climate Change Vulnerability Adaptation Assessment (CCVAA) for the Islamabad Capital Territory to reduce the city’s vulnerability to climate change-related disasters such as flooding, heat waves and landslides.
Hammered out in collaboration with the Pakistan chapter of UN-Habitat, the plan calls for assessing the current climate-resilience capacity of civic authorities and potential partners, collecting data on the vulnerability of the city’s infrastructure and reviewing existing building and energy codes.
“The … overarching goal of the initiative is to create a platform for debate amongst relevant government and non-governmental stakeholders on existing planning and devise concrete, viable projects to promote climate resilience in the future city development plans,” said CCD secretary Raja Hassan Abbas during a consultative meeting on the initiative in Islamabad on October 10. 
The CCVAA will involve redesigning infrastructure development plans for water, sanitation, road, health and education and developing slum areas to make them more resilient to the effects of climate change. The plan also calls for promoting innovations in green energy and launching energy-efficient mass transit.
Abbas said that efforts will also be made to build the capacity of individuals, communities, government and non-government institutions enabling them to respond efficiently to the vagaries of the shifting climate.
Irfan Traiq, the CCD’s focal person for the initiative, said that the investments called for under the plan could ultimately save billions of dollars.
But does the government have a figure for how much will be invested under the plan?
“Integrating a resilience aspect in infrastructure development and construction programmes is more cost-effective than failing to prepare and then dealing with the repercussion,” he said.
According to a report by the London School of Economics, 93 percent of cities globally report that green development initiatives already provide economic benefits.
Development and climate resilience experts and city managers from Islamabad’s Capital Development Authority (CDA) noted during the consultative meeting that with the increasing impacts of climate change on cities and the global shift to urban populations, there is a window of opportunity to make effective changes.
Tauqeer Ali Sheikh, Asia regional director of the Clean Development Knowledge Network (CDKN), observed that migration from rural to urban centres is caused by better living standards, infrastructure, health and education facilities, water and sanitation and job opportunities in cities.
But the burgeoning urban populations and consequent pressure on inadequate resources are causing concerns that are deepening further due to the climate change-related risks faced by cities.
UN-Habitat’s focal person for the CCVAA initiative, urban planner Sarmad Khan, said that predictions of extreme weather events striking rural and urban areas of Pakistan have highlighted an urgent need for new, viable approaches to settlement designs to enable human and non-human species to adapt to these increased climate-induced risks. 
Nevertheless, the concentration of human capital, infrastructure, industry and culture in cities like Islamabad offers a great potential to make the city a booster for economic and social well-being and to lead innovation to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and help communities and systems adjust to the effects of changing weather patterns, said Arif Hasan, an urban architect.
However, Sheikh cautioned that without strong political will, the plans were unlikely to bear fruit.
“The stakeholders concerned need to push for sensitising politicians about (the) unprecedented significance and need of the climate resilience plan(s) not only for Islamabad but also for all the cities and towns of the country,” said Sheikh.
Jamal Mujtaba, the resident of Pathan Colony, hopes to see benefits from the plan, but knows that it cannot make up for his most grievous loss.
In August this year, during a period of especially heavy rains, Jamal’s 45-year-old father Mujtaba Khan was collecting firewood floating in a storm water drain when a strong current swept him off his feet. His body could not be retrieved. Jamal hopes the plans would not let such mishaps happen with other residents of the area.
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