Environment & Natural Resources

This article weaves together an in-depth interview of a journalist and his family’s tribulations of urban flooding in the city of Karachi in Pakistan analysing various dynamics that merge erratic changing climate to faulty urban management. The article further explores the intergenerational loss due to climate change by retelling the protagonist’s experiences with family history and flooding. Socio-political elements are also discussed to shed light on the more sinister and systemic bottlenecks to urban planning and management that is more climate resilient and responsive. Finally, it merges Karachi’s most popular urban myth with climate change projections to show how people use storytelling to either fight against climate change or become complacent to its eventual disasters.

Pakistan’s contribution to global emission is less than 1 per cent yet it is the fifth most vulnerable country to climate change. Pakistan has pledged to the world that by 2030, 60 per cent of all energy produced will be "clean", generated through renewable sources. A country of more than 220 million people is expected to grow economically by 3.9 per cent in 2021 and by 4 per cent in 2022. This will put pressure on energy demands. Pakistan will definitely require long term consistent policy actions to meet energy demands through clean and renewable sources. It needs to shed its reliance on short term fixes not only to meet its energy demands but also fight climate change.

The article sheds light on threats to farming community of Hazara division in Pakistan’s North comprising of seven districts with a population of 5.3 million who are badly affected due to unusual migration of wild boars to mountainous region. A large number of farmers are giving up farming and opting for other sources of earning due to destruction of their crops by herds of wild boars, a rare species, which until 2013 was not found in the area. Environmentalists believe that migration of wild boars from tropical to temperate region is because of global warming and shrinking of habitats due to increasing urbanisation.

With the advent of zigzag technology used to transform conventional brick kilns into more eco-friendly kilns since 2017, black smoke emitting from brick kilns is now accepted to be the result of poor combustion and inefficient burning of coal, which adds to choking air pollution in Pakistan’s cities. White smoke means the combustion process is optimised, hence there is no stream of un-burnt particles, which is good for the environment and also means more profits for brick owners. In May, the Punjab Environment Protection Department announced that conversion of almost all 8,000 brick kilns in the province to zigzag technology would reduce air pollution by about 15 per cent in the future.