Prioritize Capacity and Finance for Climate Governance, Sherry
Islamabad :
“In leveraging options for climate action, especially in the leadup to COP28, Pakistan needs to prioritize finance, capacity at scale and climate governance,” stated Senator Sherry Rehman at Jinnah Institute’s roundtable titled ‘Financing Climate Action for Pakistan.’ “The intensifying terrain of environmental, climate and pollution challenges in Pakistan needs a reinforcement of priorities for government, civil society and development partners,” she added, speaking with a group of leading climate experts and heads of multilateral agencies.
Senator Rehman also launched the Centigrade Platform at this policy convening, to spur policy discourse, knowledge-based collaborations and resilience advocacy in Pakistan’s climate and environment space. She explained that the idea behind Centigrade is to generate science-based climate leadership and communications for amplifying the scale and urgency of the emergencies facing communities, as well as fostering capacity towards emerging and existing crises, both sectoral and national.
Speaking at the event, UN Resident Coordinator, Julien Harneis suggested that there was a need to tally Pakistan’s receipt of climate funds against other vulnerable countries and any variance should be examined in terms of absorptive capacity. He also observed that engineers working on Pakistan’s large infrastructure projects did not consider obvious damage that was being caused to the environment.
Samuel Rizk, Resident Representative UNDP Pakistan, stated that climate finance opportunities for a lower middle-income country (LIMC) like Pakistan were limited, and a finance and investment combination was more likely to be the solution. For development partners like UNDP to assist Pakistan, there were key challenges to consider such as the regulatory environment, deficits in human capital and technical capacity that caused slower progress, he added.
Abdullah Fadil, Country Representative Unicef, observed that the current distribution of climate finance is slanted towards integration, not inclusion. 75% climate related investments are made in hard infrastructure, as opposed to investments in resilience of vulnerable communities which help them combat climate stress themselves, he highlighted. There is a great deal of data now available through Unicef’s Multi Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS), which shows that 40% of Pakistani children are suffering from nutritional stunting, which leads to stunted economic contribution and stunted GDP growth. Development needs to be prioritised with inclusion before anything else.
Dr. Abid Suleri, Executive Director SDPI, pointed out a dichotomy in the international climate finance regime, whereby vulnerable countries like Pakistan could not leverage the Geneva Pledges unless there was requisite compliance with IMF. While he urged that fiscal prudence was necessary, making crisis adaptation funds dependent on IMF clearance was unnecessary and unfair. He suggested that Debt for Nature Swaps could be explored as options for climate finance.
Climate finance specialist Kashmala Kakakhel urged that Pakistan need not typecast itself into a donor-client arrangement in climate finance. She explained that the majority of climate funding was available for mitigation, where Pakistan was yet to navigate profitability and equity concerns, as there was a preference for grants. However, Pakistan had far more competitive dollar-to-GHG ratios in carbon trading and should consider this as a likely source of climate financing. Hadika Jamshed, carbon finance specialist, agreed with this suggestion and shared that Pakistan had developed a framework for carbon investors and several countries had expressed interest in this regard. She added that the UNFCCC has not created a rulebook for carbon financing, which presented a good opportunity for countries like Pakistan.
Senior economist Ijaz Nabi called for greater collaboration between academia and federal and provincial ministries in climate action. He also emphasized that governance should be improved before a bid for climate finance is made, as there are obvious deficits in delivery capacity. Agreeing with this observation, senior climate expert Ali Tauqeer Sheikh argued that governmental assessments of development projects was severely lacking and does provide a convincing projection of adaptation and mitigation figures. Amb. Shafqat Kakakhel traced a timeline of climate policy frameworks and observed that implementation had been disorganized and without any meaningful outcomes.
Other participants at the events included Australian High Commissioner H.E. Neil Hawkins, World Bank Senior Disaster Risk Management Specialist Ahsan Tehsin, UN Assistant Resident Representative Amir Khan Goraya, Australian First Secretary Danielle Cashen and Head Social & Environmental Policy Habib Bank Ahmed Saeed.