Senator Sherry Rehman at Jinnah Institute’s roundtable titled ‘Financing Climate Action for Pakistan’ on Thursday said, “In leveraging options for climate action, especially in the lead-up to COP28, Pakistan needs to prioritize finance, capacity at scale and climate governance.”
“The intensifying terrain of environmental, climate and pollution challenges in Pakistan needs a reinforcement of priorities for government, civil society and development partners,” she added, speaking with a group of leading climate experts and heads of multilateral agencies, a news release said.
Senator Rehman also launched the Centigrade Platform at this policy convening, to spur policy discourse, knowledge-based collaborations and resilience advocacy in Pakistan’s climate and environment space.
She explained that the idea behind Centigrade is to generate science-based climate leadership and communications for amplifying the scale and urgency of the emergencies facing communities, as well as fostering capacity towards emerging and existing crises, both sectoral and national.
Speaking at the event, UN Resident Coordinator, Julien Harneis suggested that there was a need to tally Pakistan’s receipt of climate funds against other vulnerable countries and any variance should be examined in terms of absorptive capacity. He also observed that engineers working on Pakistan’s large infrastructure projects did not consider the obvious damage that was being caused to the environment.
