ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister’s Adviser on Climate Change Malik Amin Aslam on Tuesday said that protecting natural ecosystems while respecting and protecting rights of the local forest-dependent communities was key to preserving the resource-rich biodiversity that forests contain.

“However, ignoring the rights of the forest-dependent communities, which earn livelihood from these forest resources, would only counter the efforts aimed at conservation and protection of forests,” Malik Amin Aslam said.

He was speaking as chief guest at an event titled ‘Setting Pakistan’s Agenda for the 25th Session of the Conference of Parties (COP25)’. The conference will be held next month in Spain.

The event focused on adaptation strategy. The three thematic areas of the event were climate change and human rights and the role of private sector in climate change.

Says ignoring them will counter efforts to conserve forests

The event also focused on framing Pakistan’s agenda for COP25 with focus on adaptation strategy.

“We are assigned heightened importance to protecting rights of indigenous forest communities during the largest 10 Billion Tree Afforestation Programme (BTAP) and initiatives for conservation and protection of the existing forests,” Malik Amin Aslam told the participants of the event.

Taking lessons from several other countries had shown that afforestation and forest protection programmes implemented without consultation with the local forest communities had only failed. The aim is to engage forest communities at all scales while implementing the 10 Billion Tree Afforestation Programme.

Spelling out environment and climate change-related programmes of the present government, the premier’s adviser told participants that the present government had launched four major initiatives as a part of climate change mitigation and adaptation and fighting environmental degradation.

The 10 billion tree tsunami programme is the largest afforestation programme, electric vehicle policy recently approved by the prime minister, Clean Green Pakistan Programme and Recharge Pakistan Programme, promotion of clean energy cooking stoves as part of renewable energy programme and publishing awareness-raising through climate change education programme.

“With increased understanding of the climate change risks and environmental issues, people have now started to comprehend the concept of global warming and its impacts and possible solutions to increase their resilience to vulnerabilities and risks,’ Malik Amin Aslam observed.

Talking about Pakistan’s agenda to pursue at COP25, the adviser said the event Global Climate Fund (GCF) will be the main focus of the Pakistani delegation to explore possible funding avenues for climate change mitigation and adaptation programmes to be implemented in future in Pakistan.

He also recalled that recently Pakistan had been honoured to be co-chair of GCF, which was a big accomplishment and at the same time a big opportunity and responsibility.

“As GCF is the largest international climate change funding mechanism for poor countries, this honour of being GCF’s co-chair will enable us at the COP25 in Spain, to raise Pakistan’s profile internationally as a climate-responsible and capable country,” he said.

Published in Dawn, November 27th, 2019