14 minute read
The world listened at COP27, but will Pakistan step up?
Shehbaz Sharif was a busy man during his few days at Sharm ElSheikh in Egypt. The mood around the Pakistan pavilion at the recently concluded COP27 conference sponsored by the United Nations was sombre. After all, the prime minister was attending the meeting despite intense political pressure back home, where an assassination attempt had been carried out against Imran Khan and the voices calling for fresh elections were gaining momentum. Despite the worrying political scenario back home, Sharif will have got very little time to think about it. Since he landed in Egypt on the 6th of November all the way to his departure on the 9th, the high-powered Pakistani delegation that consisted of the prime minister, the foreign minister, and the climate change minister were on their feet. The conference for Pakistan kicked-off with a bilateral meeting between the prime minister (PM) and the Saudi Crown Prince, Muhammad bin Salman on the sidelines followed by a number of bilateral meetings with different world leaders. The crowning moment for Pakistan’s campaign at this year’s meeting was a joint media briefing held at the Pakistan pavillion where the United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Gutteres, spoke alongside the PM. In the days that followed, Sharif delivered speeches pledging his support to the recently launched Middle East Green Initiative, spoke at a working breakfast of world leaders hosted by the German chancellor, attended a reception hosted by the Egyptian government and spoke at other events and talks along with daily bilateral meetings. For once, Pakistan was a major centre of attention at this global conference. The reason behind being in the spotlight was the impact of this year’s devastating floods that ravaged millions, destroyed crops, levelled entire villages, displaced 33 million people, and caused an estimated $40 billion in damages all over the country. With the extent of the damages coming during a time when the country is already at an economic crisis, the PM went to Egypt heavily pinning his hopes on the success of the conference and Pakistan’s ability to convince the world of not just its own plight and need for climate financing, but also the desperate need of other developing countries for loss and damages from the global north — essentially a demand for climate reparations. The battle cry for climate reparations is not a new one. It has been a long established fact that the global north has overwhelmingly contributed to the current climate crisis and that the effects of it are most strongly felt by developing countries like Pakistan. This year’s floods were a prime example of this, and as the banner at the Pakistan pavilion in Sharm El-Sheikh pointed out without mincing any words — What Goes on in Pakistan Won’t Stay in Pakistan.
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What is COP27?
If countries gathering under the banner of the UN to discuss the environment sounds familiar, it is because it has happened numerous times before. COP stands for ‘Conference of the Parties’ and the ongoing summit in Glasgow is the 26th such meeting of world leaders. The conference was born in Germany in 1995, which hosted COP1. Back then, the conference was arranged on an emergency basis as it was becoming very clear that climate change was a growing problem. The understanding among the scientific community that the world was warming up rapidly and headed towards environmental and ecological disaster had already been around for decades, and this was the point at which politicians and world leaders were finally taking it seriously. The COP1 in 1995 was in essence talks between world leaders brokered by the UN. Taking place in a world freshly emerging out of the shadow of the cold war, it seemed that perhaps the end of a bipolar world would mean it would be easier to reach consensus over how to confront the problem. The COP1 achieved the goal of reaching a general consensus that it was important to reach net-zero carbon emissions (an idea Pakistan has refused to pledge to this year). The next major development came in 1998, when COP3 took place in Japan. This resulted in the Kyoto Protocol, which legally bound countries to reduce emissions. However, the first cracks began to appear when the biggest emission producer in the world, the United States, refused to join the Kyoto protocol. Their reasoning was that developing countries such as China were not bound to follow the protocol, despite the US and other developed nations having a far higher impact on the entire globe. After this, there was a stalemate, and all COPs after 9/11 received very little attention and climate change slid to the back of the global agenda. It was not until COP15 in 2009 that the world’s attention was on the COP meet again, which is also when world leaders promised to provide $100 billion in climate financing to developing countries (this will become very important in the context of COP26) by the year 2020. The next big step came at COP16 in Paris in 2015, which is when major world leaders bound themselves to the Paris Climate Agreement. That was until US President Donald Trump pulled the US out of the agreement, once again leaving the biggest polluter in the world free of any consequence or responsibility.
However, there was extra attention on COP26 because incumbent US President Biden reentered the Paris Climate Agreement and promised sweeping changes at COP26. The world was also watching because 2020 had passed, the promised $100 billion had still not been made available and financing had once again been delayed. The conference became a turning point for developing countries such as Pakistan, which came together with the common purpose of having their voices heard and opening the floor for discussion on loss and damages. While developing countries managed to get a foot in the door last year, no major progress was made. This year, however, with the floods in Pakistan capturing global attention there was a lot more on the cards and a massive opportunity at hand.
It is not a question of financing but of governance. Just look at what you need to be spending money on. You need it for research and development. We cannot outsource thinking
Ali Sheikh, climate change expert
Why this one was crucial for Pakistan
According to the Center for Global Development, developed countries are responsible for 79% of historical carbon emissions. Yet studies have shown that residents in least developed countries have 10 times more chances of being affected by these climate disasters than those in wealthy countries. Further, critical views have it that it would take over a 100 years for lower income countries to attain the resiliency of developed countries. Unfortunately, the Global South is surrounded by a myriad of socio-economic and environmental factors limiting their fight against the climate crisis.
This year, the issue was front and centre like never before and Pakistan was the flagbearer. To put things into perspective, until last year Pakistan and other developing countries were demanding reparations for either climate disasters to come or past ones that were a little vague. This year, Pakistan went still reeling from the effects of the flood that were clearly caused by climate change.
The biggest road-block was always going to be the conversation surrounding loss and damages, which has been on the top of the agenda this time around. That said, COP27 of course is just where consensus building happens. There is also a donor conference planned specifically to help Pakistan out and the dates for that will be announced soon
In short, climate change has resulted in a gargantuan increase in the amount of monsoon rainfall that Sindh and Balochistan have seen this year. The two provinces saw the highest amount of water fall from the skies in living memory, recording 522% and 469% more than the normal downpour this year according to the met department. “Sindh has received 680.5mm of rain since July when the monsoon season actually began,” said a Met official.
“As per calculated and defined standards, Sindh normally gets 109.5mm of rain in the monsoon season. So it’s 522% higher than normal. Similarly, Balochistan receives 50mm rain on an average every monsoon, but it has so far recorded 284mm — 469% higher. The country has overall witnessed 207 times higher rainfall so far this monsoon and the season is going to last till September-end.”
The effects are devastatingly clear. Pakistan was hit with a major wave of climate-change related activity that resulted in death, destruction and total annihilation in some areas. The international media attention that followed allowed Pakistan the spotlight at this year’s COP, particularly with the PM being asked to co-chair the conference. And given the losses Pakistan and other countries like it have had to face, it was always going to be an opportunity to bring up loss and damage.
The hotly contested issue of climate reparations, in particular the establishment of a financial mechanism for addressing the irreparable losses and damage caused by climate-induced extreme events in least developed countries, was always going to stir controversy. This was encapsulated best, perhaps, by the response of the United Kingdom. Recently elected Prime Minister Rishi Sunak briefly attended the conference and reaffirmed Britain’s commitment but remained quiet on the issue of reparations, “despite British negotiators backing a last-minute agreement to address reparations to countries suffering the worst impacts of climate change, with Pakistan leading the push for such a commitment,” according to a recent article in The Guardian.
But despite the resistance from expected quarters, the conference was largely a success for Pakistan on the international stage. “Pakistan has been getting a lot of attention here, and the UN Secretary General addressing the media from our pavilion was a positive step,” claims Fahd Husain, special assistant to the PM who was also present at the conference in Egypt. “There has been a lot of interest in what Pakistan has said and we’ve emerged as a player in these conversations. We’re trying to show people that what’s happening in Pakistan won’t remain limited to our borders
Sherry Rehman, minister for climate change
either,” he says.
“It helps of course that we have a high-powered delegation here. Whenever you have the head of a government at one of these conferences it shows that you’re serious about getting something done, and flanked by the foreign and climate change ministers both Pakistan’s are a very serious delegation. The biggest road-block was always going to be the conversation surrounding loss and damages, which has been on the top of the agenda this time around. That said, COP27 of course is just where consensus building happens. There is also a donor conference planned specifically to help Pakistan out and the dates for that will be announced soon.”
Even if we get the money, do we know how to spend it?
For Pakistan, financing is necessary immediately. “The COP27 must capitalise the adaptation fund and introduce agility and speed in countries that need to build resilience,” says Sherry Rehman, the minister for climate change. “Simplified, long-term climate financing instruments are needed to plug severe capacity deficits in the developing countries right now as the protracted periods of pipelining funds lose potency when resilience needs change faster than the speed of resource dispersion,” she said. “We need climate funds that are easy to access, predictable transfers. We must reduce the delays in funds mobilisation; the needs end up changing on the ground by the time the funds arrive.” All in all, according to the latest report of the Post-Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA), Pakistan needs at least $16.3 billion for postflood rehabilitation and reconstruction. The PDNA report, released by the representatives of the government and the international development institutions, calculated the cost of floods at $30.1 billion – $14.9 billion in damages and $15.2 billion in losses. “Our priority is an adaptation for long-term measures to ward off climate change impacts. Pakistan is in the front line for advocacy and played a proactive role for highlighting climate finance. Our efforts will be focused on seeking $100 bln per year as promised in 2009 for climate finance and do the advocacy to increase the pledge three times,” adds Rehman.
Yet beyond this immediate need for reparations, Pakistan also needs a clear agenda on what it wants to do on the climate front. There is the immediate concern of rising temperatures, for example. According to Ali Sheikh, an expert on climate change and development, it is in the fundamental national security interest of Pakistan that global average temperatures stabilise at 1.5 degrees Celsius, since a change of 1°C has already caused serious disruptions and brought the economy to its knees. If no action is taken, Pakistan, like many other developing countries, will simply not have the residual resilience to cope with recurring climate disasters.
“Climate change has two key impacts. The first is to increase heat and carbon in the air. The other precipitation variability — which means changes in the trend of rainfall. In the short term, some of these conditions might even result in better yields for some of our crops but at the end of the day it will be fatal for our agriculture. We will start seeing deficiencies in micronutrients in different crops which could result in nutritional deficiencies in the population. The private sector is already adding these nutrients to products such as rice artificially but this will only further increase the economic disparity that exists in our country,” he explains.
According to him, Pakistan faces a problem where even if it is given the climate financing that it is asking for, it will not know how to spend this money effectively. “It is not a question of financing but of governance. Just look at what you need to be spending money on. You need it for research and development. The losses that have been calculated are all infrastructural, but there is very little attention that has been paid to more long-term solutions. Losses in agriculture are becoming more and more severe and predictable for example but they continue to happen every single year,” he explains.
“Even the mechanism we have to estimate loss and the response to it is very flawed. It is based on a top-down calculation instead of a bottom-up approach. In a top-down approach you think in dollars and in big terms, without consulting the real onground stakeholders such as farmers. Even the calculation of $30 billion in damages is infrastructural for the most part, and it has been calculated by institutions that think they will end up lending some of that amount. The UN Secretary General made a flash appeal based on the projects they were conducting in Pakistan for what they were doing. Each agency places themselves in the centre and makes that the centre of the issue. They are looking at their own business prospects, but the dilemma is that they have all the credibility. This is the kind of study that the government of Pakistan should have been doing. We cannot outsource thinking,” he explains.
In this point, Sheikh is absolutely right. We must remember that the emissions from the developed world have impacted the developing world. However, within countries like Pakistan this impact is most strongly felt by the lowest rungs of society — in this case the farmers that have lost their homes and livelihoods. If calculations are made for infrastructure losses, how will poor Sindhi farmers that neither own the land they tilled nor have any land rights to it be compensated? How will they get their fair share when they already have loans to pay off and even the meagre makeshift roof above their heads has been taken away?
Pakistan has done well to get where it is in terms of climate financing at COP27. It would have been unfortunate if we were unable to leverage the devastation of the floods to at least get this point across. But if climate financing comes, it will be of no use if we do not begin planning an equitable and efficient way to spend it on research and development now. n
