RANKED as one of the most climate vulnerable country, Pakistan has crossed a critical milestone by achieving an overarching Sustainable Development Goal-13 Climate Action, according to UN annual Sustainable Development Report 2020 launched recently.
It indeed is a major achievement for the country to have achieved the goal ten years before deadline of 2030 – something which is an example for other countries to emulate. With this, Pakistan has shown itself as responsible and serious country committed to global efforts aimed at tackling the challenge of climate change. The whole credit of this success definitely goes to Prime Minister Imran Khan’s vision of clean and green Pakistan under which the project of one billion tree tsunami in the first place was successfully executed in Khyber- Pakhtunkhwa and in the second phase the scope of this project has been extended to the whole country envisaging plantation of ten billion trees. Adviser on Climate Change Malik Amin Aslam deserves appreciation for the hard work he is putting in to translate the vision of the Prime Minister into reality. Given the threats posed by climate change to Pakistan in the form of floods and drought, there is need not to be complacent but further accelerate efforts to mitigate its effects and ensure adaptability to the changing weather patterns by building the necessary infrastructure. Special focus should be given to the clean and green energy projects in addition to initiatives such as electric vehicle policy are the way forward to better cope with the issue of environmental degradation. Since it is the matter of future of young generation, the PM should continue to personally monitor progress on all the environment-related projects to ensure their timely implementation. At the same time, it is important that we also set examples for others in achieving sixteen others SDGs in the areas of poverty reduction, inequality, health, education, water sanitation, food security, peace and justice. Covid-19 has provided us an opportunity to set another milestone in the health sector.
