The ongoing global climate change will inflict multifarious damages on Pakistan and one of these could be a crippling water shortage.
This was the consensus among ecological experts at the one-day conference on climate change sponsored by the Habib University at a local hotel on Saturday.
In the panel discussion titled, “Climate change in the local context”, the panelists said that Pakistan’s two main sources of water were the glaciers and the monsoons. With global warming, glaciers were melting away more rapidly which could mean early depletion of the source, they added. Besides, they said, the monsoon pattern had become erratic. Sometimes they were delayed. On other occasions, they just did not occur, this was causing dearth of the precious commodity. Pakistan being an arid sub-tropical country, the global warming could prove disastrous. There would be droughts and as a result there would be epidemics and destruction of infrastructure. One of the panelists said that it was alarming to see sheep crossing the bed of the Mighty Indus. “Mangrove forests are dying for lack of water and mangroves are essential for the marine fish to survive.”
The panelists said that there was a dire need to urgently chalk out a strategy to conserve forests, adding, the government, the civil society, and the NGOs would have to work in concert.
Rab Nawaz, Director, World Wildlife Fund, Sindh, said, “People build their habitations on riverbeds or river banks which is really bad planning on the part of the concerned authorities”.
Irfan Ahmed, an expert on renewable energy sources, said that coal energy wouldn’t make much of a difference. What really mattered, he said, was the quantum of renewable energy. “The best thing to do would be to conserve energy.” Thar coal, he said, had large sulphur content and utilisation of this coal could cause sulphur dioxide pollution.
In his keynote address, US expert and Nobel Prize winning scientist, Dr Bruce McCarl said, “The earth is likely to have warmed up by 4 degrees centigrade by the end of the century which is real bad news for agriculture”. He laid the blame on human involvement in environmental degradation and said that in the US, 85 per cent of the pollution came from cars or coal combustion. In 2013, he said, there had been record emission of greenhouse gases and there was likely to be far less rain in sub-tropical areas like Texas (US) and Pakistan.
Under the circumstances, Pakistan will have to carry out a detailed review of its cropping pattern, McCarl said.
The next panel discussion, titled, “Climate change and the role of the media”, comprised journalists Kamal Siddiqui, Editor, Express Tribune; Rina Saeed Khan, free lance journalist; Badar Alam, editor, Herald; and former Senator Javed Jabbar. Jabbar highly lauded the journalists for highlighting the issue of climate change and environmental degradation since 1972 when the first UN moot on climate change was held. He said that the English language media were far more sensitized than the vernacular ones, adding that the latter would have to pull up their socks. However, he lamented the pollution of the media by commercialism where the media only pander to the whims of the advertisers and just debate the issues of their choice. He condemned the corporatisation of the media.
Besides, he said, it was unfortunate that there was no public broadcasting system in Pakistan, one where there were no advertisements, the government was the owner with a totally independent editorial policy. In this context, he was all praise for the BBC and recommended something along the same lines for Pakistan
Rina Saeed Khan was of the opinion that Pakistan was the least emitter country and the least contributor to global pollution.
Kamal Siddiqui said that his publication had published a whole lot of incisive stories on environmental degradation. And cited a story by an outstation correspondent who reported that people in Thatta had switched to betel nut cultivation as there was not enough water to grow rice in the area.
Badar Alam said that no system had been devised to communicate the technical findings to the common folk.
In the last panel discussion on the South Asian Context, Mohsin Iqbal, Head, Global Change Impact Studies Centre, Islamabad, said that climate change was a reality and it happened mainly on account of anthropogenic activity. He said that almost 80 per cent of the farmers had land that was degraded and because of rising temperatures, crop yields were decreasing. He said that in the South Asian context the countries shared a number of resources, namely the Himalayan and Karakoram mountain ranges. All the countries were overpopulated, and had a low technology base, he added.
He called for policy making at the regional level despite the acrimony that marked relations among certain SAARC member countries.
Dr Heinz Gutscher, Professor Emeritus of Social Psychology, University of Zurich, with the help of slides of Switzerland, said that the conditions in Switzerland were the same as in Pakistan till about 300 years ago. But then, he said, it was earnest and selfless policies and there was realisation that no improvement could come about without education. As such undivided attention was accorded to education and the lot of the country really changed for the better, he added.
(report by Anil Datta, 26 January 2014, The News)
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