MORE than 150 world leaders gathered in Paris earlier this month to attend the United Nation’s climate change talks. This raises hopes but it may be stressed that every country should be able to seek its own solutions to combat global warming.
Likewise, developed countries should provide stronger financial support to developing countries by mobilising $100bn each year from 2020 onward in addition to transferring climate-friendly technologies.
Pakistan, due to its geographic location in South Asia and heat surplus zone of earth, will be severely impacted by the climate change. In Pakistan, the annual mean surface temperature has a consistent rising trend since the beginning of 20th century.
Increase of 0.6-1°C in mean temperature in arid coastal areas, arid mountains and hyper arid plains, 10-15pc decrease in both winter and summer rainfall in coastal belt and hyper arid plains, and 18-32pc increase in rainfall in monsoon zone have been observed.
According to International Food Policy Research Institute, South Asia will be the most severely impacted by climate change. By 2050 it could lose 50pc of its wheat productivity. Recent ranking by Maplecroft of the UK places Pakistan at 28th globally and among the top 10 outside Africa that will be most severely affected.
The overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that burning fossil fuels like oil, natural gas and coal is adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and therefore responsible for most of climate change currently being observed. The current carbon dioxide level is the highest in the past 650,000 years.
Pakistan contributes very little to the overall greenhouse gas emissions but remains seriously concerned as climate change will affect its numerous regions, ecosystems and sectors of economy due to several reasons such as significantly increasing air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, rising sea level, vacillating wind patterns, persistent heat waves and frequent storms.
The dynamics of climate change shall retard agricultural production, communal health, human well-being, environment and energy conservation, natural resources management and societal productivity.
Pakistan is already amongst the most tree resource-poor countries with a skimpy 5.2pc forest cover. At the current rate, the global average temperature is predicted to rise from 3°- 7°F by 2100 and changes will become more pronounced over time.
Rising sea levels enhance the risk of catastrophic flooding. The low-lying coastal regions of Pakistan including the city of Karachi are at significant risk from projected sea-level rise of 40cm by the end of this century.
Owing to shifting weather patterns, rice, cotton and sugarcane might experience substantial decline. For instance, for each degree of warming, wheat production could drop by 15-20pc.
Being a predominantly agriculture economy, decrease in crop yields in Pakistan will affect livelihoods and food production and pose a high risk to food security. As a result of impacts on agriculture, the livestock production is predicted to decline by 20-30pc creating a crisis in milk, meat and poultry supplies and pushing prices beyond reach of an average Pakistani.
Increasing temperature will accelerate melting of glaciers on the country’s mountains. Geologists forecast by mid-century, most mountain glaciers may be gone. Depletion of glaciers poses a threat to irrigation and drinking water supplies as rivers depend solely on glacier melting. Landsat images of Batura glacier for the year October 1992 and October 2000 has revealed a decrease of 17km2 in its size.
Pakistan needs to focus on water conservation, by its irrigation losses, local rain harvesting, while preventing catchments and reservoirs’ degradation and contamination. It needs to manage risk to crop failure due to extreme weather and effective communication of climate-related information to farmers. Dynamic weather patterns have potentially high risk of both more floods and more droughts. Back-to-back occurrences of history’s worst flooding during the last decade in the country are unique phenomenon. Moreover, from 1999 to 2002, droughts in Sindh and Balochistan killed 2m animals.
Climate change is an urgent challenge. It is imperative for countries such as Pakistan to discuss, document and understand the key scientific facts that explain the causes and effects of climate change today as well as projections for the future.
Adapting to climate change requires reducing vulnerability and building natural resilience against its impacts; developing sound policy, technology and investment choices for emission reduction and energy conservation; avoiding deforestation by introducing sustainable forest management practices; securing country’s water resources; maintaining early warning systems based on meteorological services to predict floods, drought, cyclones, tsunamis, wind shear, fog and hailstorms, and enhancing levels of information and communication among decision-makers and other target audiences by promoting climate change science.
In a nutshell, the impacts of climate on agriculture based economies needs to be tackled establishing a state-of-the-art National Climatology Research Centre to carry out interdisciplinary studies in geosciences, meteorology, hydrology, agriculture, and disaster management. It could be achieved by reconstructing the earth’s past climatic conditions for developing climate change models and predicting the future.
Published in Dawn, Business & Finance weekly, December 14th, 2015
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