The United Nations (UN) panel on climate change has raised alarm bells over global warming now dangerously close to being out of control, terming it ‘irreversible’. The report is an alarming and worrying assessment of the state of climate change. This is the most significant and extensive report on climate change released by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on climate Change (IPCC) since 2013, stating it is ‘unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land’. The science supporting the fact that the atmosphere, ocean and land temperature is steadily rising has always been present, but unfortunately the required collective global effort to slow down the pace of these changes was never able to materialize with politics and powerful lobbies becoming major roadblocks. Perhaps the most significant progress made in terms of major world leaders coming together for global climate action was the Paris Climate Agreement, signed in 2015. However, just two years later the USA, a crucial participant in the accord, elected Donald Trump as President. A vocal critic of the breakthrough deal, his administration stopped complying with the Paris Agreement soon after his election and formally withdrew from it in 2020.
In Pakistan, climate change has never been a major policy item on any government’s agenda, neither during the election campaign nor after coming to power. It is therefore encouraging and commendable that the PTI is the only government that has made a tangible effort to create awareness about global warming through its various tree plantation drives. While the numbers it often quotes are hard to verify and at times mathematically unsound, the optics are good. And that is where the problem lies; Prime Minister Imran Khan holding a shovel full of soil in front of a tree sapling is great for a photo op, but it contributes basically nothing towards addressing many of the major shortcomings in terms of reducing carbon emissions and pollution that is rampant across the country. Factories are allowed to operate without many checks and balances in the way of accounting for the waste they pump into the air daily. The annual ‘smog season’ and the resultant toxic air quality is a testament to how little control there is over vehicular and industrial emissions and the use of coal as a fuel, not to mention the burning of waste and agriculture materials. If the PTI truly wants to be a champion of climate change, it needs to do much more and fast.
