The Knowledge Forum organised a Webinar on “Climate Change – The Disconnect Between Communities and Policies” on October 15, 2021. Over 50 participants from across the country attended the webinar.
The environmental experts Muhammad Toheed (urban planner), Afia Salam (environmental journalist) and Basil Andrews (Karachi Urban Lab) were the main speakers at the webinar.
Senior urban planner and architect Muhammad Toheed pointed out that Pakistan’s climate report has indicated that floods will increase in Pakistan in the coming years. According to him, participation at the grassroots level, like common people and civil society, including NGOs, in policymaking is often absent.
He said in Karachi, 52 per cent of people are living in informal settlements, which the policy-making authorities and bureaucrats consider illegal, so they do not include such settlements in their development schemes, thus people living in those settlements suffer a lot.
Senior environmental journalist Ms Afia Salam said that due to climate change, the rain pattern has increased in Pakistan. Also, sea intrusion in the coastal areas of the Indus Delta has destroyed millions of acres of agricultural land. It has affected people’s lives and their livelihoods. She said big dams and barrages were constructed to irrigate agricultural lands.
She said the Media’s role in Pakistan on climate change issues is unfortunately only event-based, except few in-depth writings by those environmental journalists who do investigative stories and go to the communities.
Basil Andrew pointed out that the media needs to do climate change reporting concerning what is happening at the ground level, and we need to know our local climate change issues.
He pointed out that during the last lockdown in June this year, most people were confined to their homes, where they were facing heat waves along with load shedding. Some people started investing in buying UPS and batteries.
In her presentation, Ms Zeenia Shaukat from The Knowledge Forum said Pakistan is the 8th most effective country in terms of climate change in the world.
