{"id":2462,"date":"2017-12-05T13:38:20","date_gmt":"2017-12-05T13:38:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hisaar.org\/?p=2462"},"modified":"2017-12-05T13:38:20","modified_gmt":"2017-12-05T13:38:20","slug":"climate-change-real-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hisaar.org\/hf\/climate-change-real-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"Climate change – a very real problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

KARACHI:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

United States President Donald Trump is known to toss around the term \u2018fake news\u2019 in relation to many things, especially climate change. To challenge this, speakers at the Karachi International Water Conference explored, at a rather sensationally titled session \u2018Trumping the Devil \u2013 Is Climate Change Fake News?\u2019 various aspects of climate change and the impact it will and already has had on Pakistan.<\/p>\n

Chairing the session, Rudolph Cleveringa, executive secretary of the Global Water Partnership, spoke about the link between water stress and migration, explaining that there were 184 peer-reviewed research articles proving this. Climate change and water stress lead to migration and many countries want to curb this and the influx of refugees, he said.<\/p>\n

Speaking about climate change in the Pakistani context, he said the country has allocated only 8% of its public expenditure for water.<\/p>\n

Environmentalist and author Zulfiqar Halepoto was the only speaker to touch upon the topic of the session and discussed the global and US reaction to Trump\u2019s strong stance against the phenomenon of climate change. Illustrating his point with screenshots of tweets and video clips, Halepoto said many citizens and government officials in the US did not support their president\u2019s view that climate change was fake. Since his election, he has refrained from openly disparaging the existence of climate change, according to the environmentalist\u2019s presentation.<\/p>\n

Water crisis attributed to failure of governance<\/h4>\n

\u201cThe [effects of] climate may vary but it is very real,\u201d said Dr Zaigham Habib, a consultant hydrologist. She discussed the confusion between natural climate variabilities and climate change, explaining that droughts and floods are natural occurrences but the frequency with which they have been occurring is alarming.<\/p>\n

\u201cScientists need to separate what\u2019s part of natural climate change and what is not,\u201d she told participants of the session. Dr Habib cautioned that carbon dioxide levels have peaked in the last 60 years, illustrating her point with a graph tracing the carbon dioxide levels in the world for the past 400,000 years.<\/p>\n

Pakistan is among 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change, she warned. Dr Habib also cautioned that the formation of large lakes was troubling. All these occurrences are cause to worry, she said. She pinpointed the impacts of climate change such as uncertainty in water availability, decrease in crop yields, loss of biodiversity and increase in health risks.<\/p>\n

She linked climate change to the agriculture sector and the recent failed potato crop. \u201cSome climate change impacts, like melting glaciers, cannot be reversed,\u201d she said, urging people to forget Trump and instead accept that Asia has it worse in terms of climate change impacts.<\/p>\n

Sindh governor bursts the bubble at 3rd Karachi International Water Conference<\/h4>\n

Dr Lubna Ghazal, an assistant professor at Karachi University\u2019s geography department, said the increasing population is leading to an increased demand for water. Pakistan is a country that suffers both floods and droughts.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy 2025 one-third of the human population will be living in areas lacking fresh water and Pakistan will be among those areas,\u201d she said, adding that water will become the new oil in the not-so-distant future.<\/p>\n

According to the United Nations, the demand for water increases by 10% every year, she said. Dr Ghazal added that Pakistan claims to be an agro-based economy but most of its population is highly undernourished. What we need is monitoring, management and financial support, she urged.<\/p>\n

Daanika Kamal, from The Asia Foundation, put a human rights spin on climate change, arguing that the issue was about protecting future generations. \u201cHuman rights are \u2018human\u2019 because humans both suffer and impose the [changes],\u201d she said. \u201cThe blame game doesn\u2019t work,\u201d said Kamal, explaining that the situation worsens while countries try to pass the buck. By putting a human rights spin on the issue, she said that countries would be liable to impose limitations on non-state actors, and assist other countries reduce the effects of climate change in their territories. By doing so we would be taking care of all humans, she said, adding that another right to protect is the right to culture and heritage, which will be endangered by climate change-related migration.<\/p>\n

Read the original Article on\u00a0tribune.com.pk<\/a><\/h4>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2463,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home-page-feature","category-news-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hisaar.org\/hf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hisaar.org\/hf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hisaar.org\/hf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hisaar.org\/hf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hisaar.org\/hf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hisaar.org\/hf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2462\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hisaar.org\/hf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hisaar.org\/hf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hisaar.org\/hf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hisaar.org\/hf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}