DAWN Editorials - 24th March 2025
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2025 2:45 pm
Climate action
PAKISTAN’S climate challenge is enormous. Despite contributing less than 1pc to GHG emissions, the country is among the nations most vulnerable to the impact of climate change. In fact, the Global Climate Risk Index lists Pakistan as the world’s fifth most climate-vulnerable country.
The massive floods of 2022 that killed hundreds, displaced millions, and inflicted economic losses in tens of billions of dollars, besides increasing food insecurity, highlighted the kind of existential threat the cash-starved Pakistani economy must fight off to survive. As if the periodic extreme weather events, ranging from heatwaves to abnormal rains to destructive floods, did not pose enough of a challenge, the shrinking glaciers in the north mean the country would have far less water for its agriculture in the not too distant future. Sadly, the fact that policymakers understand the implications of climate change for the people and economy does not mean their concern will automatically translate into concrete policy actions anytime soon.
The world is too busy with its own problems to focus on and fund our climate challenge. Only a few hundred million dollars have so far been received out of more than $10bn promised by various nations and global agencies to help Islamabad rebuild the infrastructure destroyed in 2022 and rehabilitate those displaced by the deluge. A large number of affected people remain displaced nearly three years after the floods.
Though the World Bank has pledged to finance some climate-resilient infrastructure projects under its 10-year Country Partnership Framework initiative, the promised funds are too meagre to make any significant impact. Now the government is looking to the IMF to provide $1bn in climate funding and has launched green action bonds to finance sustainable green projects for greater climate change adaptation and mitigation. However, there is little evidence to back its assertions that it is integrating climate-resilient policies across the sectors.
On Friday, Finance Minister Mohammed Aurangzeb rightly pointed out a huge financing gap and lack of technical capacity in our fight against climate change. However, there are policy actions that simply need political will and commitment and not money to address the climate change challenges.
With international climate financing slow to come, it falls upon our policymakers to use whatever money we have in such a way that it helps create climate-resilient infrastructure and climate-adaptation measures. Waiting for outside help to arrive will only aggravate our climate challenges and not mitigate them. As the finance minister has emphasised, sustainable economic and environmental growth go hand in hand. It is time for the government to translate its verbal commitments into concrete actions that promote environmentally stable growth.
Published in Dawn, March 24th, 2025
TB burden
AS the world observes World Tuberculosis Day, we confront the sombre fact that despite being both preventable and curable, the disease continues to claim over a million lives each year. TB is a contagious bacterial infection which most commonly affects the lungs but can also spread to the brain, kidneys and bones. In 2023, the WHO estimated that 10.8m people fell ill with TB and 1.25m people died. Multidrug-resistant TB — which does not respond to the two most powerful TB drugs — has emerged as a global health security threat, with only two in five patients receiving appropriate treatment. The disease disproportionately affects low- and middle-income countries and is fuelled by risk factors such as undernutrition, smoking, diabetes and HIV. Although some progress has been made globally — with over 79m lives saved through TB efforts since 2000 — the WHO warns that progress is now at risk. A severe drop in funding has disrupted diagnostics, human resource deployment, data systems, and medicine supply chains. In 2023, only 26pc of the $22bn required for global TB care was available. TB research also remains underfunded, with just one-fifth of the $5bn target achieved in 2022.
Pakistan’s situation is deeply worrying. According to the World TB Report 2024, it accounted for 6.3pc of the global TB burden in 2023, ranking it among the countries with the highest number of cases. It also contributed nearly 8pc to the global gap between estimated TB incidence and the number of people who were actually diagnosed and reported — highlighting critical challenges in case detection. Furthermore, Pakistan is among the 10 countries with the widest gaps in access to MDR-TB treatment, which suggests major shortcomings in diagnosis, reporting and treatment rollout. Decades of underinvestment in public health have left our TB control programme reliant on donor support. This must change. Pakistan must increase domestic investment in TB diagnosis, treatment and research, expand coverage of WHO-recommended rapid diagnostics, improve reporting and surveillance mechanisms, and scale up access to shorter all-oral MDR-TB treatment regimens such as BPaLM. The country also needs to integrate TB care with broader primary and lung health services — especially given the overlapping risks posed by diabetes, undernutrition and pollution. The WHO has called on all governments to ‘Commit. Invest. Deliver’. Pakistan must heed that call — and make TB elimination a health priority.
Published in Dawn, March 24th, 2025
Unsafe passages
WRETCHED social conditions add an extra layer of cruelty to ordinary lives. The UN’s migration agency says that “at least 8,938 people died on migration routes worldwide in 2024”, making it the fifth year that numbers hit record highs and the deadliest one for migrants — almost 9,000 lives lost globally in preventable tragedies. The statistics are, in all likelihood, much higher as scores of deaths and disappearances remain undocumented. The fatalities were highest for Asia, Africa and Europe in 2024: “2,778, 2,242, and 233 respectively”, with 2,452 people perishing in the waters of the Mediterranean, a prime passage to Europe for the desperate. In Pakistan, a national crackdown was announced following the Greek boat tragedy last year, but a few arrests and dismissals was all it took for the government’s fury to fade. These actions were cosmetic at best because the central challenge lies in fighting a deep-rooted culture of corruption and impunity, which permits trafficking networks to operate freely; they keep official palms greased to evade justice.
Subsisting on a bare minimum of resources in times when the average person’s standard of living has fallen significantly, migrants, often poor and marginalised, are easily deceived about the perils these journeys entail. In the quest for a better life, they face abuse and are packed like sardines into unhygienic quarters as they pass through countries that flout international humanitarian laws by shirking all responsibility; even their law-enforcement does not protect them. To alter the gaze on migrants, the narrative has to change: they are victims and not offenders. While recent cases of human traders manipulating air routes to hold migrants for ransom highlight the growth in their range of methods,joblessness, the absence of education and poverty create a sense that happiness and stability can be found in another land. The battle is to ensure that these emotions are solely for home.
Published in Dawn, March 24th, 2025
PAKISTAN’S climate challenge is enormous. Despite contributing less than 1pc to GHG emissions, the country is among the nations most vulnerable to the impact of climate change. In fact, the Global Climate Risk Index lists Pakistan as the world’s fifth most climate-vulnerable country.
The massive floods of 2022 that killed hundreds, displaced millions, and inflicted economic losses in tens of billions of dollars, besides increasing food insecurity, highlighted the kind of existential threat the cash-starved Pakistani economy must fight off to survive. As if the periodic extreme weather events, ranging from heatwaves to abnormal rains to destructive floods, did not pose enough of a challenge, the shrinking glaciers in the north mean the country would have far less water for its agriculture in the not too distant future. Sadly, the fact that policymakers understand the implications of climate change for the people and economy does not mean their concern will automatically translate into concrete policy actions anytime soon.
The world is too busy with its own problems to focus on and fund our climate challenge. Only a few hundred million dollars have so far been received out of more than $10bn promised by various nations and global agencies to help Islamabad rebuild the infrastructure destroyed in 2022 and rehabilitate those displaced by the deluge. A large number of affected people remain displaced nearly three years after the floods.
Though the World Bank has pledged to finance some climate-resilient infrastructure projects under its 10-year Country Partnership Framework initiative, the promised funds are too meagre to make any significant impact. Now the government is looking to the IMF to provide $1bn in climate funding and has launched green action bonds to finance sustainable green projects for greater climate change adaptation and mitigation. However, there is little evidence to back its assertions that it is integrating climate-resilient policies across the sectors.
On Friday, Finance Minister Mohammed Aurangzeb rightly pointed out a huge financing gap and lack of technical capacity in our fight against climate change. However, there are policy actions that simply need political will and commitment and not money to address the climate change challenges.
With international climate financing slow to come, it falls upon our policymakers to use whatever money we have in such a way that it helps create climate-resilient infrastructure and climate-adaptation measures. Waiting for outside help to arrive will only aggravate our climate challenges and not mitigate them. As the finance minister has emphasised, sustainable economic and environmental growth go hand in hand. It is time for the government to translate its verbal commitments into concrete actions that promote environmentally stable growth.
Published in Dawn, March 24th, 2025
TB burden
AS the world observes World Tuberculosis Day, we confront the sombre fact that despite being both preventable and curable, the disease continues to claim over a million lives each year. TB is a contagious bacterial infection which most commonly affects the lungs but can also spread to the brain, kidneys and bones. In 2023, the WHO estimated that 10.8m people fell ill with TB and 1.25m people died. Multidrug-resistant TB — which does not respond to the two most powerful TB drugs — has emerged as a global health security threat, with only two in five patients receiving appropriate treatment. The disease disproportionately affects low- and middle-income countries and is fuelled by risk factors such as undernutrition, smoking, diabetes and HIV. Although some progress has been made globally — with over 79m lives saved through TB efforts since 2000 — the WHO warns that progress is now at risk. A severe drop in funding has disrupted diagnostics, human resource deployment, data systems, and medicine supply chains. In 2023, only 26pc of the $22bn required for global TB care was available. TB research also remains underfunded, with just one-fifth of the $5bn target achieved in 2022.
Pakistan’s situation is deeply worrying. According to the World TB Report 2024, it accounted for 6.3pc of the global TB burden in 2023, ranking it among the countries with the highest number of cases. It also contributed nearly 8pc to the global gap between estimated TB incidence and the number of people who were actually diagnosed and reported — highlighting critical challenges in case detection. Furthermore, Pakistan is among the 10 countries with the widest gaps in access to MDR-TB treatment, which suggests major shortcomings in diagnosis, reporting and treatment rollout. Decades of underinvestment in public health have left our TB control programme reliant on donor support. This must change. Pakistan must increase domestic investment in TB diagnosis, treatment and research, expand coverage of WHO-recommended rapid diagnostics, improve reporting and surveillance mechanisms, and scale up access to shorter all-oral MDR-TB treatment regimens such as BPaLM. The country also needs to integrate TB care with broader primary and lung health services — especially given the overlapping risks posed by diabetes, undernutrition and pollution. The WHO has called on all governments to ‘Commit. Invest. Deliver’. Pakistan must heed that call — and make TB elimination a health priority.
Published in Dawn, March 24th, 2025
Unsafe passages
WRETCHED social conditions add an extra layer of cruelty to ordinary lives. The UN’s migration agency says that “at least 8,938 people died on migration routes worldwide in 2024”, making it the fifth year that numbers hit record highs and the deadliest one for migrants — almost 9,000 lives lost globally in preventable tragedies. The statistics are, in all likelihood, much higher as scores of deaths and disappearances remain undocumented. The fatalities were highest for Asia, Africa and Europe in 2024: “2,778, 2,242, and 233 respectively”, with 2,452 people perishing in the waters of the Mediterranean, a prime passage to Europe for the desperate. In Pakistan, a national crackdown was announced following the Greek boat tragedy last year, but a few arrests and dismissals was all it took for the government’s fury to fade. These actions were cosmetic at best because the central challenge lies in fighting a deep-rooted culture of corruption and impunity, which permits trafficking networks to operate freely; they keep official palms greased to evade justice.
Subsisting on a bare minimum of resources in times when the average person’s standard of living has fallen significantly, migrants, often poor and marginalised, are easily deceived about the perils these journeys entail. In the quest for a better life, they face abuse and are packed like sardines into unhygienic quarters as they pass through countries that flout international humanitarian laws by shirking all responsibility; even their law-enforcement does not protect them. To alter the gaze on migrants, the narrative has to change: they are victims and not offenders. While recent cases of human traders manipulating air routes to hold migrants for ransom highlight the growth in their range of methods,joblessness, the absence of education and poverty create a sense that happiness and stability can be found in another land. The battle is to ensure that these emotions are solely for home.
Published in Dawn, March 24th, 2025