Adapting to climate change is no easy task, but it seems that Pakistan is trying to make a fist of it. It seems its very lack of development will serve it well, because the challenge before it is not to convert existing industries to lower emissions, but to set up new industries with them in the first place. This would enable the earning of carbon credits, which could be sold on the Voluntary Carbon Credit Market. A report, ‘Net-Zero Waves: The Path to Building A Trusted Carbon Market in Pakistan’ says that the country has 27 projects in various stages which would earn it carbon credits. All of this demands that a voluntary credit mechanism be set up, which followed best practices for monitoring, verification and reporting, coupled with AI-driven platforms which could manage emissions data efficiently.
At the same time, speakers at a seminar in Islamabad ‘Business Case for Decarbonisation in Pakistan’ showed that decarbonization could be good business, provided that carbon markets allowed the development of a win-win situation where reducing emissions became good business. There is a wider context as well: Pakistan is well-placed to become a regional centre for a carbon credit market. It therefore makes sense for it to educate its population so that enough would be available to man the IT-driven market.
However, one of the important things to remember about the whole process. While Pakistan may meet its emission goals for 2030, it will mean nothing if other countries do not. It is unfortunate but true that the climate change crisis is beyond the power of any single nation, or even a group of nations, to solve the crisis Therefore, Pakistan must wield its diplomatic clout, low as it might be, to the biggest polluting countries, whether they be unwavering friends like China, or constantly sniping at us, like the USA, and urge upon them the need to pollute less. This is not a problem that any one country can solve, or is responsible for. It requires the cooperation of all nations. Thus governments, and not just Pakistani governments, must learn to think of the consequences of their actions on neighbours, on the globe as a whole, rather than just in their narrow national frameworks. That is the ultimate lesson of both the report and the seminar.
