Prime Minister’s Advisor on Climate Change said that protecting and restoring forests and other natural ecosystems while ensuring and respecting the protection of rights of the local forest-dependent communities is key to preserve 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 harm the efforts aimed at conservation and protection of forests, Malik Amin Aslam warned.
The prime minister’s advisor on climate change expressed these views here on Tuesday while delivering his keynote address as a keynote speaker at n event titled "Setting Pakistan's Agenda for the 25th Session of the Conference of Parties (COP25) being organised in Spain this year from 2-13 December. The event focused on adaptation strategy. The three thematic areas of the event were climate change and human rights, the role of private sector in climate change and framing Pakistan's agenda for COP25 with focus on adaptation strategy.
“Given the realisation, we are assigned heightened importance to the protection of indigenous forest communities’ rights in out the country’s historically 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.
He said Experiences of several countries have shown that afforestation and forest protection programmes implemented without consultation with the local forest communities have only failed. Thus, efforts are being made to consultant and 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 advisor Malik Amin Aslam told participants of the panel discussion that the present government has launched four major initiatives as a part of climate change mitigation and adaptation and fighting environmental degradation.
Of them all the 10 Billion Tree Tsunami Programme is the largest afforestation programme, followed by Electric Vehicle policy recently approved by the Prime Minister Imran Khan, Clean Green Pakistan Programme and Recharge Pakistan Programme, promotion of clean energy cooking stoves as part of renewable energy programme and publish awareness-raising through climate change education programme.
“Thanks to increased understanding of the climate change risks and environmental issues, the people have now started to understand the concept of climate change and its impacts and possible solutions to increase their resilience to the climate vulnerability or risks,’ Malik Amin Aslam observed.
He also informed the participants of the event that these environmental conservation and climate change-related programmes have been launched envisioned by the Prime Minister Imran Khan, who is highly concerned about the environmental and climate change problems being faced by the country and is committed to tackle them at all levels.
Talking about Pakistan’s agenda to purse at COP25, Malik Amin Aslam told participants of the event Global Climate Fund (GCF) will be main focus of the Pakistani delegation and explore possible funding avenues for climate change mitigation and adaptation programmes to be implemented in future in Pakistan.
He also recalled that recently Pakistan has been honoured to be co-chair of GCF, which is undoubtedly 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 told the participants.
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