By Ali Imran
ISLAMABAD: Advisor Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre (ADPC) Lieutenant General (R) Nadeem Ahmed on Wednesday said the public sector departments involved in disaster management, climate adaptation and mitigation were facing serious capability issues and required capacity building on priority to avail global climate funds.
Addressing a one-day training workshop on Training on Accessing Climate Finance Funds – Green Climate Fund (GCF) organised by the ADPC under its Climate Adaption and Resilience (CARE) for South Asia Project, in his opening remarks he said the training was a key step towards developing knowledge about green climate funds available at a large scale but remained underutilised due to incompetence of the relevant departments to avail that financing facilities.
Lieutenant General (R) Ahmed said the country was lying in the middle of a region surrounded greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitting countries which was resulting in the depletion of the natural resources at a fast pace.
He added that the country needed to move forward for achieving climate resilience with a holistic and regional approach and also with special focus on Pakistan as well. The ADPC Adviser CARE for South Asia project underlined that the country have to develop a balance between climate adaptation and mitigation with more focus on the former.
“If the country calculates the exact amount of finances spent on climate resilience then it can make it easier to fetch international funding earmarked for addressing climate change.
We need to identify the real GHGs emitting sectors like agriculture and energy sectors are releasing 45% of the total carbon emissions of the country,” he underlined.
General (R) Ahmed mentioned that the country had to start working out decarbonisation of the energy sector to achieve its national determined contributions pledged globally to cut its carbon emissions further. He highlighted that the public departments’ capacities was a major challenge during disasters whereas institutional capacity building of provincial departments with a result-oriented approach was necessary to ensure promising climate resilience endeavours.
The ADPC Adviser while guiding the participants to achieve GCF accreditation for getting funds, said five key measures to be adopted were proper implementation plan, responsible entity for implementation, fiduciary safeguards, accountability checks, coordination and effective result based monitoring.
He warned that due to less utilisation of funds under the National Disaster Risk Management Fund for climate change mitigation and adaptation the World Bank was seriously considering to withdraw its funding in this regard. Project Coordinator, ADPC Sana Zulfiqar introduced the workshop objectives and project details to the participants. Deputy Secretary Ministry of Planning, Development and Special Initiatives Jawwad Rabbani also addressed the workshop and delivered his welcome note.
He underscored the need to exploit multilateral opportunities for climate financing as new multilateral funding bodies were supporting developing countries like Pakistan.
The training intended to develop knowledge of the public and private partners on GCF, funding mechanism and strategies, and capacity building of relevant departments for tapping international climate funding.
