Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: On Monday, Chairman Senate Standing Committee on Defence and member Senate Climate Change Committee said that Pakistan was one of the most vulnerable countries due to climate change that suffered major freak weather incidents like floods, forest fires and avalanches.

Senator Mushahid Hussain was addressing the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) which was a two-week-long international climate summit going on in Glasgow, Scotland and shed light on Pakistan’s role in combating Climate Change challenges, according to the news release.

Senator Mushahid said that 10 years ago, 20% of Pakistan was submerged underwater due to super floods in Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), and the 2012 Gyari Sector avalanche that martyred 150 soldiers and civilians at the Siachen Glacier that occurred some 12,000 feet above sea level.

He underlined that as Chairman of Senate’s Defence Committee he had worked to redefine the concept of National Security, which was traditionally based on only military might. “It is now redefined to focus on Human Security, protecting lives and livelihoods of people, giving priority to Health, pandemics, population planning, education, and Climate Change and Environment,” he added.

During his speech at COP26 at Glasgow, Senator Mushahid Hussain proposed that all global initiatives for connectivity like China’s BRI, the United States’ B3W, and the European Union’s Global Gateway, should allocate special funding for climate mitigation projects amongst the most vulnerable Climate Change affected countries like Pakistan.

It would help in effectively meeting the challenge of Climate Change which was one of the biggest non-traditional security threats facing humanity and which required a collective response to meet this common challenge, above partisan politics, he concluded.