Challenges of Climate Change | Editorial

It’s pretty clear that the Imran Khan administration has done more than any previous Pakistani government to raise awareness about all the problems that come with climate change and also to mitigate its effects. It’s true that less developed countries like Pakistan didn’t do nearly as much to poison the environment, as it is called, as the more advanced ones did. Yet we must still bear the brunt of it; and that too a lot more than others. It’s also true that we missed the bus to industrial expansion and now we cannot catch it because the kind of policies that made industrial giants out of a number of western countries are no longer acceptable owing to environmental concerns.

Still we are doing what we can and, to give credit where it is due, the PTI government’s obsession with planting billions of trees up and down the country might just do the trick by slowing down some of the most harmful effects of climate change. The PM’s personal interest in the matter – as he’s often shown sporting a shovel and planting a sapling or two – not only makes for good optics but also pushes some of his eager lieutenants into follow his lead with a lot of vigour, which can only be good for the country.

There’s also something to be said about the argument that this approach does not really work beyond optics; and that factories are not made to check their carbon emissions and the waste that they pump into the atmosphere. Be that as it may, it would be unrealistic, and not very smart, to cut industrial output along with planting trees to improve the environment; because that would send the economy through the floor and a lot more people would suffer far more than they would from the climate. So it’s far better to approach such things in phases. And what the government is doing is as smart a way of going about it, in the initial phase, as any. The PM also inaugurated the world’s biggest Miyawaki urban forest in Lahore the other day, which builds on the bigger 10 billion tree tsunami project. If we stay the course then slowly but surely we will dig ourselves out of this hole of climate disaster that we got thrown into for no fault of our own. *

Published in dailytimes on 12th 2021​