ISLAMABAD: Senate Standing Committee on Climate Change and Environmental Coordination Chairperson Senator Sherry Rehman on Monday said pollution was a serial killer in Pakistan.
Speaking at the ‘Pioneering Solutions for Climate Resilience’, Ms Rehman said measures as small as tuning our engines were needed to help control smog.
We are saying that burning of crop residue in India is causing smog in Lahore, but we need to understand that we cannot build a wall, therefore we have to take measures to control pollution, she added.
She commended the SDPI for taking sustainability beyond a cliché and making it applicable.
She also congratulated the winners of the Sustainability Awards.
The winners and their categories are:
Social Impact and Community Engagement category: Abid Rafiq, CEO HBL
Water Conservation Champions: Dr Mohammad Tufail, pro vice-chancellor NED University of Engineering and Technology
Production, Innovation, and Decarbonisation: Anum Zahid from Artistic Milliners
Gender Equality: Nadir Gul Bareech, CEO Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund
Social Impact and Community Engagement: Kehkashan Usman from MG Apparel.
Renewable Energy: Naveed Ashraf from Fauji Cement
Circular Economy: Rafae Qazi, head of production and sales, Concept Loop
Agritech and Food Security: Col Salar Malik from Fauji Fertiliser Company Limited
Ms Rehman said bigger companies could scale up their operations, which raised their profile to win these awards.
Therefore, she said she would like SDPI to focus on young tech entrepreneurs and have a separate category for them.
The senator said, four youth in Balochistan had invented a fibre material that had the same density as common plastic but was also completely biodegradable.
“Let’s find them and bring them into the mainstream,” she added.
Senator Rehman deplored lack of coverage by the mainstream media on climate emergency, stating that “media is treating climate as a disaster tool”.
She said media only focuses on climate change when a disaster occurs, primarily holding print media responsible because “they know better”.
Therefore, the SDPI should have a “journalist category” for the awards to reward those who focus on climate change as a priority, she added.
The Senate committee chairperson said, when our eyes get sore, motorways are closed and flights are cancelled, only then media highlights the issue.
She said the 2022 floods had affected one-third of the country and “we are still picking up the pieces”.
She said even those of us not directly affected should ask ourselves how we help the affected people in resuming their normal lives.
Ms Rehman said according to data, Pakistan was the fifth country on the list of countries vulnerable to climate change. “However, I think that we are at an even higher risk because our population is not trained to deal with climate emergency,” she added.
On water, the senator said Pakistanis had one of the highest per capita water usage which means we are wasting water which is a “finite, precious” resource which would not last forever.
She said we have examples of countries like South Africa where citizens had to ration water usage. “If we do not want to be like them, we should consume less,” she added.
The senator deplored that a large amount of unfiltered sewage was being dumped into Rawal Dam on daily basis, which was the main source of water for Rawalpindi and Islamabad.
“Two of the provinces of the country were green when I was a little girl; now they are brown,” she added.
Ms Rehman said we were ingesting microplastics directly from food which was causing a higher rate of disease and immunity to medicines, adding that only one per cent out of the 30 million tonnes of solid waste worldwide was recycled.
In the end, Sherry Rehman inaugurated the 2nd Sustainability Investment Expo 2024.
