Stressing
on the need of environmental governance notable scholar and Climate Change expert Dr.
Pervaiz Amir says "Governments must integrate aspects of climate change
while designing development projects" to prevent environment from
degradation. As a key note speaker of a seminar "Environmental Degradation
and Climate Change in Karachi -- With Special Focus on Karachi", he was of
the opinion although Pakistan is globally ranked at the 7th among the world'
most vulnerable countries in 2017 but as a matter of fact we are at the number
one position, because of the size of population and nature of calamities.
The event
was organised by Monthly Farozaan and
Global Environmental Management System (GEMS) in cooperation with Farozaan Environmental Protection
Organisation, Karachi Forum for Climate Change. Various speakers and
participants of the seminar shared their opinions and disappointments that all
the world nations take awareness of conservation and environment safety as the
foremost challenges, however in Pakistan these are lowly prioritised areas
before state authorities.
Dr.
Pervaiz vehemently criticises governments' policies of outsourcing public
amenity services like solid waste disposal, water supply, etc and says
"Outsourcing is a bad strategy as governments can make the sector of water
and waste disposal sustainable by themselves." Citing the consequences of environment
degradation, the renowned scholar blamed the forestry and irrigation
departments most for deforestation and desertification in the country because
of which the span of winter season has been limited to just 35 to 40 days in a
year.
Dr.
Pervaiz observed that the population of Karachi alone is bigger than those
countries who are above Pakistan in the Economic Intelligence Unit' list of
most vulnerable countries and also revealed multiple threats namely droughts,
hill storms, tornados, smog, landslides and absence of pristine water, posed to
the "badly managed city" in future.
Secretary
Environment Sindh Dr. Baqa ullah Unar said in the seminar that as a developing
country the provision of basic needs like education, food, jobs and etc remain
"much bigger tasks" before government,
therefore alongside government people should also come up to contribute in the improvement
of environment by themselves. He adds " SEPA are providing free plants of
Coconut and Neem to people for promotion of plantation in Sindh" for that
purpose. Citing the contamination of ground water as a big threat Dr. Unar told
the audience that various industries owners and business community were not cooperating
and working on effluent plants in their premises so the SEPA imposed penalties
on them. He further complained that other
departments like Agriculture or Motor vehicle are not working alongside SEPA to
prevent environment from degradation.
Mahmood
Khalid the Editor in Chief of Farozaan
said Climate Change is arguably more dangerous than terrorism and told the
audience that "Through Farozaan
we have been creating awareness and solving problems about environment
deterioration since 2006, in fact we are the one who have written and produced most
on environmental issues in Pakistan."
While
Senator Haseeb Baig expresses "we are sitting on a volcano and no
government will come to rescue so we must improve environment by ourselves
through plantation and cleanliness habits".
Earlier, Dr Waqar Ahmed from Karachi University Environmental Studies Department, gave a brief overview of Urban Heat Island in Karachi and revealed that very unprecedentedly extreme weather changes have been observed since couple of years in Karachi Heat Index.
By
Editorial, Infocus
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