KARACHI: Pakistan is going to create 200,000 new green jobs by the year's end under its ecological protection and restoration projects, climate change adviser to Prime Minister Imran Khan said on Sunday.
Under the government’s flagship 10 Billion Tree Tsunami project — a five-year tree-planting program launched in 2018 — some 85,000 people have already found employment, officials say. Most of the green jobs, including in guarding forests, eco-tourism and planting saplings, were created last year, when pandemic lockdowns left many daily wage earners without work.
Although economic activity has to some extent bounced back, central bank data shows that 3.2 million of those rendered jobless by COVID-19 still remain unemployed.
Another "green stimulus" initiative for post-coronavirus recovery is expected to partly address the problem by boosting eco-tourism and involving communities in running national parks — 15 of which were established last year.
"The initiative, funded by the World Bank, will start from July this year and is estimated to provide around 200,000 new jobs by the end of this year," the PM's aide, Malik Amin Aslam told Arab News.
"National Parks Academy in Balochistan will be set up and focused training of six-eight weeks would be imparted," he said.
As Pakistan is among the countries worst affected by climate change, having been regularly hit by devastating floods that displace hundreds of thousands of people and destroy agricultural land, experts say that more allocations into green jobs are a way to help sustain the country's economic ecosystem.
"Pakistan suffers around $4 billion economic losses annually on various accounts, including loss of soil and its productivity, health impacts of pollution etc.," Dr. Vaqar Ahmed, joint executive director at Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), told Arab News.
He added that more allocations to combat environmental damage would result in reduction of these losses.
For Samiullah Tariq, research director at Pakistan Kuwait Investment, Pakistan has high potential for developing the green job sector.
“Pakistan has lot of potential spending on environment related projects," he said. "Pakistan should also protect its environment via encouraging these types of industries for our future generations."
