True cost of climate change

The PTI government is perhaps the only one that the country has ever had which explicitly recognises the danger that climate change poses to the country. Maybe it does so realising the massive loss that the climate change-induced floods and other natural disasters have brought about in the country. In its latest move, the government approved Rs125 billion for the prime minister’s enhanced billion tree project. The project, when it was first introduced in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P), helped boost tree cover in the province and now the government hopes that when the billion tree tsunami project is complete, it will help increase the overall tree cover in the province by a percentage. The government is also taking a host of other measures to curb pollution in the country coming from various sources like vehicles and plastic products. Campaigns to replace plastic bags and to eliminate plastic from the federal capital are already underway.

It has, however, emerged that efforts by the government to plant more than 10 billion trees in the country have violated its own financial rules. In clearing Rs125 for the project, it failed to abide by regulations under the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA) which stipulates that only those schemes will be approved which are financially viable. The law, which the PTI government bulldozed through parliament as part of its move to only ensure ‘profitable’ projects, is put in place as per IMF requirements. Worrying still is that the manner in which the project falls afoul of PFMA, the government has essentially failed to complete a cost-benefit analysis of the project while serious observations over its viability were raised. If anything, this should be alarming.

Ideas may be bulletproof, but projects need to be viable. More importantly, the government must not be ignorant of the hard numbers behind such projects, otherwise they just make for dinner table niceties.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 6^th, 2019.

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