Daily Times

The experts at a panel discussion intended to highlight financial opportunities available to harness its capacities to address environmental degradation impacts on Monday emphasized the need to explore untapped funding options with clear strategy, planning, and homework for enhancing its climate resilience.

The Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) organized a panel discussion on “Accessing Climate Finance for a Resilient Pakistan”, its policy paper written by Ahmed Awais Khaver, a research associate and policy expert at the Institute.

Deputy Executive Director, Resilience Development Program & Policy Outreach, SDPI, Shafqat Munir in his opening remarks said the Institute had conducted a series of policy papers on the country’s access to climate finance, disaster risk reduction (DRR), institutional capacity and loss and damage fund. He said it was beyond that Pakistan was facing climate change, but rather it required adaptation and mitigation efforts to ensure its sustainable future.

When the issues of mitigation and adaptation were discussed it had a price tag that should come from the polluting entities or the country’s bearing the burden of global warming, he added. The panel would be led by Ahmed Awais Khaver the lead author of the policy paper.

Dr Munir underlined that the negative climate financing like investments in solar panels whose waste would be an issue after 25 years also needed to be considered in the major policy discourse. “Climate change adaptation and DRR need to be linked to get more climate financing to improve the resilience of the country whereas Carbon taxation is an interesting idea and China’s example is worth mentioning which had been implemented for its power companies,” he added.

The policy paper author, Ahmed Khawer briefed the participants on his study document. Explaining the international context of climate finance, he said the adaptation finance had increased from 20-28% from 2017-20 whereas there was stagnated funding provided for both mitigation and adaptation-related projects. “There has been a little increase in international climate finance as $803 billion have been provided globally for climate finance,” he added. In Pakistan’s context, he said the 2022 floods alone caused $30 billion in losses $16 billion was required for reconstruction and it required $7-14 billion for annual adaptation purposes. Pakistan has not utilized climate investment funds (CIFs) and there was space to engage CIFs and bilateral and multilateral funds still available at the global level, he added. The author suggested that the country also needed to build coherence and alignment in its existing policies, ensure capacity building of technical and human resources, and develop legal and institutional frameworks for public-private partnerships to attract investments at international and domestic levels.