ISLAMABAD: Climate change could cost the economy $14 billion a year due to natural disasters and other losses, which is almost 5% of the GDP, stated a former state minister for environment according to a press release.
Former environment junior minister Malik Amin Aslam was addressing a seminar on “Outcomes of post-Durban climate change negotiations”, organised by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) in Islamabad on Thursday.
PIDE Vice-Chancellor Dr Rashid Amjad said, “Instead of upholding individual interests and blaming one another for [greenhouse gas emissions], we should look for practical and collective preventive measures.”
In a detailed presentation, Aslam said that the Durban Climate Change Negotiations were a very important platform to discuss the three major environment challenges like resuscitating the Kyoto Protocol, deliver climate finance to vulnerable countries and how to survive in the overall economic recession.
Pakistan, he said, is a very low emitter of greenhouse gases but one of the worst victims of climate change -- Germanwatch places Pakistan as the “most affected” country for 2010 and in top 10 for 1990-2010.
He said that Pakistan has been focusing on its red lines to ensure that its development pathway not be constrained, “which we have achieved so far.”
He added that Pakistan is highly vulnerable to climate change, which is compounded by the fact that it has a sharply rising emissions future.
Pakistan’s vulnerability, he said, comes from the fact that it is in the region of glacial melting zone, which means living in a neighbourhood of unavoidable “vulnerability”, with the main issue being “water”.
About 90% of the natural disasters in Pakistan are due to the changing climate, he said. “The most alarming thing is that the frequency of these natural disasters is going up with 60% occurring in the past ten years.”
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climate change is a thing everyone is going to have to deal with at some point. the earths climate changes on a cycle, which is obvious if you go back and study reports and so forth. the thing that has everyone up in arms, is how much do humans contribute. Nations that have already gone through their own industrialization have begun to work on minimizing emissions, but this is a hard thing to practice and regulate, based on consumer demand for products at low cost. It is definitely cheaper to not worry about emissions and so on, but then again, if we do nothing, what is going to happen to future generations? Population explosion (which is happening in developing nations) is putting a strain on their regions resources and also global ones, because developed nations often help out in these countries, on top of doing what they have to do for their own people. Changing weather patterns and the effects of natural disasters are everywhere and definitely hard to ignore, which are also getting worse on the impacts of nations because people like to populate areas close to shorelines or areas that are nicer. Glaciers have been dumping tons and tons of fresh water into oceans, which is at some point going to cause the main Atlantic current to shut down or reverse, which has happened in the past. Even if it doesnt get to that point, it can cause major issues because the currents depend on a specific balance of salinity and temperature to operate. End point- people need to realize that everyone has to be aware that what they do, affects to actions of others around them, if one person stops caring, it tends to reverberate throughout others, and when no one cares, we are all screwed..royally.
@Dudley Jones:
You probably meant cementing, not fermenting. Furthermore, your assertion that climate change is not anthropogenic has no verifiable scientific basis.
“We are currently putting one million years worth of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere each year,”
“since the industrial revolution, humanity has burned about 500 billion tonnes of carbon fuels.”
Oh, come on folks! Everybody knows climate change is just a hoax perpetrated by the global scientific community to harass those poor ol' corporations, and make us clean up after ourselves...
..right?