PM's Coordinator on Climate Change & Environmental Coordination Romina Khurshid Alam on Monday vowed to take all-out measures to rid the country of the menace of plastic pollution and tackle environmental and climate change-related challenges. She was addressing an Earth Day 2024 event here on Monday at the secretariat of the Commission on Science and Technology for Sustainable Development in the South (Comsats) organized in collaboration with the Ministry of Climate Change and Environmental Coordination (MoCC & EC). During her keynote address to the participants of the event, she urged all the government and non-governmental stakeholders, educational institutions, the academia and representatives of the business and the industrial sector to support the government’s measures for the holy cause of eliminating the plastic pollution from all aspects of the public live. “Tackling plastic pollution by shunning its use at all levels is inevitable to tackle the plastic pollution and without it the dealing with the growing problem of environmental degradation will remain unaddressed,” the PM’s coordinator cautioned. Ambassadors, counsellor-generals and High Commissioners of more than 12 countries particularly ambassador of Azerbaijan were in attendance. They also announced to extend all-out technical and non-technical support to the Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s vision of environmentally-sustainable and climate-resilient as well as plastic-free Pakistan. Azerbaijan will host the two-weeks UN-led global climate summit (COP29), scheduled to kick off from November 11 this year in its capital city of Baku. Romina Khurshid Alam also highlighted that Pakistan was the first South Asian country, which launched the World Economic Forum's National Plastic Action Partnership programme and took lead to global and regional efforts for tackling the plastic pollution. PM'S coordinator while underscoring the ministerial efforts for dealing with fallouts of climate change, she apprised the participants that under the Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s vision for climate-resilient Pakistan measures were being taken on war footing protect lives and livelihoods of the people and enhance climate resilience of the public infrastructure.” “For this, mainstreaming climate change in the national curriculum was being emphasized with relevant stakeholders including the High Education Commission (HEC) and the Ministry of Federal Education,” Romina Khurshid Alam added. She said that PM had assigned top priority to tackling environmental and climate change-related challenges being faced by the people and natural ecosystems and for this a committee was being constituted, which would comprise experts from various fields from all federating units including Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan. Emphasising the contrasting actions of climate change, the PM’s coordinator said Africa was facing droughts while Pakistan was experiencing the devastating floods. However, tackling the common climate risks required regional and global collaborations to effectively overcome the global climatic crisis and its impacts on various socio-economic sectors, particularly water, energy and food sectors. While highlighting the plastic pollution-caused hazards for aquatic biodiversity, the PM ‘s Coordinator Romina Khurshid Alam pointed out that some 103 tonnes of the plastic is dumped into various water bodies, which have badly degraded the water quality & blocked drainage systems in the country. As much as 1600 tonnes of the plastic was openly burnt, which was causing respiratory illness among the public, she added. The PM’s coordinator on climate change said that while the situation of growing plastic pollution in other countries is not encouraging, tackling this menace of plastic pollution was not possible without convergence of global efforts so as to save our aquatic life and other terrestrial ecosystems from hazards of the plastic pollution. Romina Khurshid said further that through her ministry, she is approaching all the government and non-governmental organisations to completely ban the single-use plastics and had adopted zero tolerance policy using single-use plastic bottled water in her ministry.
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