Though the purpose of the Breathe Pakistan conference, held in Islamabad on Friday, was to highlight the effects of climate change on one country, Pakistan, it only served to show that climate change does not respect international borders, which are shown up as what they really are: lines on maps drawn by men. That should not conceal how the countries of the Global North are trying to escape the responsibility of their mad rush towards development, which was fuelled by the burning of fossil fuels, and thus the production of greenhouse gases, which have resulted in the sort of climate change which the entire world is undergoing. Pakistan’s experience with climate change so far has shown how matters will go. There is no freakish weather like snow in May or floods in the desert. So far, there has just been an intensification of existing weather. The same weather, but only worse. Like the floods Pakistan had in 2023, which occurred when floods normally occur, only more so. Indeed, the title of the conference ws a reference to the smog which Pakistan suffered this winter, which was frightening enough, but was ,merely a heightening of an existing trend.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who had considered the issue important enough to address the conference, was right to point to the need for nation-states to cooperate, because while some problems have cross-border solutions, greenhouse gas emissions cannot be controlled by states such as Pakistan, but by polluters like the USA and China. Mr Sharif was right to pint out that more grant-based funding was need to pay for damages ans to make countries resilient, but there is the danger of polluters thinking that they can simply throw money at the problem and it will go away.
One of the more profitable avenues to be explored at the conference was that of public-private partnership. It must noted that at the latest CoP,CoP 28 in Baku, climate financing was discussed in terms of public aid and also by the private sector. While public aid means giving fonors leverage, private funds seek profits. This mindset has to change if Mankind is to survive the insidious challenge of climate change. It would be best for powerful states to remember that their advantages will be pointless if there are no other states, and for private financial organizations to remember the meaningless of wealth when there is nothing to spend it on.
