Policy draft to mitigate climate effects

 PAKISTAN’S climate change policy whose draft took more than a year to be readied is now under print and may be presented to the federal cabinet for approval in a few weeks.

The draft will unveil an action plan to mitigate adverse effects of extreme weather events as witnessed in 2010 and again in 2011 and likely to face more such happenings in the years to come.

The subject is partially covered by Pakistan Environmental Protection Act 1997 and the National Environment Policy, 2005, but they have proved to be ineffective for lack of implementation of the suggested measures. A high-level committee appointed by the prime minister to coordinate actions on climate change has failed to meet even once in the past three years.

How far the climate change policy will succeed in motivating the bureaucracy to meet the challenge is difficult to foresee. But the magnitude of the challenge — rise in temperatures, frequency of heavy rains and floods, large-scale damages to property and infrastructure, rehabilitation of climate refugees and losses in agricultural output — is too enormous that it hardly provides any room for lethargy, inefficiency and corrupt practices on the part of relevant authorities.

The draft will address the issues of adaptation to the changes in climate and their impact on sectors such as irrigation, energy, crop patterns, clean water, transport, disaster management and capacity building of several departments. Besides, people in Pakistan will have to be prepared to learn to live and cope with most of the changes in climate in the future. More

 

A World of Gray

CANBERRA – Václav Havel, the Czech playwright and dissident turned president, and North Korean despot Kim Jong-il might have lived on different planets, for all their common commitment to human dignity, rights, and democracy. When they died just a day apart this month, the contrast was hard for the global commentariat to resist: Prague’s prince of light against Pyongyang’s prince of darkness.

But it is worth remembering that Manichaean good-versus-evil typecasting, to which former US President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair were famously prone, and of which we have had something of a resurgence in recent days, carries with it two big risks for international policymakers.

One risk is that such thinking limits the options for dealing effectively with those who are cast as irredeemably evil. The debacle of the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 should have taught us once and for all the peril of talking only through the barrel of a gun to those whose behavior disgusts us.

Sometimes, threats to a civilian population will be so acute and immediate as to make coercive military intervention the only option, as with Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya, at least at the time of the imminent assault on Benghazi in March. But more often it will be a matter of relying on less extreme measures, like targeted sanctions and threats of international prosecution – and on diplomatic pressure and persuasion. More