An insight into the eco-friendly revolution that is now unfolding in environmentally vulnerable Pakistan
According to the Global Climate Risk Index 2020, Pakistan came fifth among the countries most vulnerable to climate change. According to an article published by UNDP Pakistan in Nov 2020 regarding the environmental momentum in Pakistan, it was noted that in the period 1999- 2018, Pakistan suffered from 152 extreme weather events including the drastic heat waves in Pakistan’s sixth-largest city Peshawar and the country’s largest port city and only beta-global city Karachi as well as the alarmingly annual increase in smog levels in Pakistan’s cultural capital Lahore. Such catastrophic events have led to losses amounting to USD 3.8 billion. The raging health impact of such environmental calamities has wreaked a great deal of financial havoc on Pakistan’s economy.
Two years after the electoral victory in Pakistan’s 2013 General Elections, in 2015, Pakistan’s center-right political party Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz’s (PML N) federal minister for climate change Mushahidullah claimed that “Environment at the heart of PML N manifesto” despite the obvious failure of the Capital Development Authority (CDA) and Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency (Pak-EPA) to address the surge in levels of environmental degradation in the Pakistani capital Islamabad. Such vague promise from a federal minister of Pakistan came at a time when Islamabad had already witnessed the destruction of the country’s third-largest national park the Margalla Hills National Park largely owing to unfettered commercial development, damage to forested areas around the Rawal Lake which resulted in polluting of the Rawal Dam the capital’s primary source of water, the conversion of rainwater streams into sewage drains as well as the destruction of Islamabad’s symbolic Shakarparian Hills through rampant concretization. The empty promise of making the capital “sustainable” and not favoring development “at the expense of the environment” came from the federal minister only after protests from local environmental activists. Similarly, in July 2015, former Pakistani prime minister and founder of PML N Nawaz Sharif inaugurated work on the expansion of the Islamabad Expressway, a project Pak-EPA objected to because of the chopping of over 300 trees during the project alongside a planned shrinking of a green belt to create space for a signal-free artery. The same political party failed to deliver on anything environment–friendly but rather continued to keep on throwing empty promises at the public with a comprehensive manifesto it came up with for 2018 General Elections that had included off-grid solar solutions and the creation of a clean energy fund.
Such futile comprehensiveness of electoral manifestos with a failure to turn promises into concrete and positive swift result-oriented actions is not new to Pakistani politics and has been a feature of the political scene since the late 1990s when the late Benazir Bhutto then the supreme figure of the center-left party Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) came up for the first time in the electoral history of Pakistan with an entire page of manifesto being devoted to her planned environmental program for the country. The ill-fated environmental program fell prey just like the government of Bhutto to an ouster in 1996. The caretaker government which had taken over the reins of power had failed to enforce the National Environment Quality Standards (neqs) — a set of environmental standards imposed on the country’s 50,000 industrial units that were operationalized by Bhutto’s government. Though the current chairman of PPP Bilawal Bhutto Zardari included climate change among the “major 21st-century problems that recognize no borders” while speaking at the 2018 Davos World Economic Forum but his government in the country’s Sindh province has failed to come up with any successful and sustainable solutions to problems such as the inequitable water rationing in low lying communities.
On the other hand, Pakistan’s current ruling centrist party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has to a certain extent delivered on its environmental initiatives despite its alleged failure to deliver on many of its economic promises such as its failure to control the rise in medicine prices beyond inflation as alleged by the former federal minister of finance, revenue, and economic affairs Dr. Miftah Ismail who belongs to currently country’s largest opposition party that is PML N.
The reforestation scheme of the Billion Tree Tsunami designed to counter the climate change impact had been successfully implemented ahead of schedule in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province by the ruling PTI government which had come into government in the province after an electoral victory in the 2013 general elections. The project restored 350,000 hectares of forests and degraded land. With its coming to power in the center in 2018, the PTI government has replaced coal projects with hydroelectric power projects and created over 85,000 green jobs ranging from plant care to the protection of forests in a bid to turn the national economy into a nature positive one. Such developments were reported in a video article by World Economic Forum in March this year and in the February of the same year Pakistani capital got the inauguration of its first Miyawaki forest at the hands of prime minister Imran Khan as part of a Spring Tree Plantation campaign.
The current ruling party of the Pakistani state may have lagged in meeting many other expectations of the populace but their seemingly steadfast commitment to environmental friendly policy implementation is indeed surprising and promising for a country very vulnerable to the environmental hazards but has still suffered in past from a sheer governmental disregard towards swift addressing of such challenges.