ISLAMABAD: As Pakistan eyes generous support for its flood victims at a donors’ conference in Geneva on Monday, experts remain less hopeful of it due to political instability, and a lack of strategy and implementation by the South Asian country.
Pakistan and the United Nations (UN) are jointly hosting a gathering of international donors in Geneva, aiming to raise funds for the victims of last summer’s unprecedented floods that experts partly attributed to climate change. The deluges, which at one point submerged a third of the country’s territory, killed more than 1,700 people, affected 33 million Pakistanis and caused over $30 billion losses.
The UN in its two flash appeals sought $816 million in emergency aid last October, but the world body has received only a third of the total amount required for food, medicines and other supplies for the survivors. It recently warned that the funding raised so far will run out after January 15, while millions of Pakistanis are still looking for help to rebuild their lives.
Former Pakistani diplomat Abdul Basit said multiple factors had impacted the world response to the UN flash appeals, aimed at helping Pakistan respond to climate-driven calamities.
“The factors included political instability, corruption, donors’ fatigue due to multiple disasters. Trust deficit is also there and the Russia-Ukraine war has also taken over the world’s attention in the press,” he told Arab News.
“They question what we have done to prepare ourselves to stop such calamities and even now, I don’t see much impact at the upcoming conference as it is happening too late and pledges will be made but [it] will be difficult to convert them.”
Pakistan has been witnessing political instability since the ouster of former prime minister Imran Khan in a parliamentary no-trust vote in April. The ex-premier has been campaigning to bring down the coalition government of PM Shehbaz Sharif, which he says took over as part of a United States-backed “foreign conspiracy.” Washington and Khan’s rivals deny the allegation.
Basit also said Pakistan had had a “faulty” narrative as it kept on pinning responsibility for the disaster on the world’s heavily industrialized nations, instead of apprising the international community about the steps it had taken to mitigate the impacts of climate change.
But Lt. Gen. (retired) Nadeem Ahmed, a former chief of Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), said the damage assessment report, prepared in collaboration with the UN, World Bank and other institutions, would now help Islamabad convince the donors about the extent of damages and needs, however, they would still require a proper implementation plan.
“The donors want to know your implementation plans and strategies which we haven’t presented effectively so far and it was one of the reasons that only one-third of the appealed amount was pledged, despite the peak of the international media coverage and attention,” Ahmed told Arab News.
“They want to know is there any uniform and central mechanism or each province will go with its own way which does not suit donors and will also ask for the mechanism to ensure transparency, monitoring and evaluation.”
The former NDMA chief said the absence of these things brought a poor response from the international community and Pakistan needed to satisfy the donors at the upcoming conference, otherwise the pledges would not be materialized.
“In 2005 and 2010, a regional situation, especially Afghanistan’s, kept Pakistan politically relevant and the world powers helped Pakistan generously, but this time the situation is different,” he said, referring to the 2005 earthquake and the deadly floods in 2010.
Durre Mahmood, an environmental specialist, said the donors required a proper mechanism and strategy for Pakistan to get funding flows.
“Unfortunately, when we ask for international funding, we don’t have a plan on how to utilize it,” she told Arab News.
“We do not have a national adaptation plan on the country’s level, but donors want clarity on how that money is going to be disbursed and where are the potential sectors in priority areas that we are going to focus.”
In flash appeals, she said, Pakistani officials were seeking funds without a plan that caused a slow response.
Asif Ali Khan Durrani, another former diplomat, said everyone would suffer if the world does not act now. The world has to help poor countries become climate-resilient and reduce gas emissions, he said.
“The world was slow in response without realizing that it will harm them as well because it has become a global phenomenon,” Durrani told Arab News.
Pakistan, with the world’s fifth-largest population, is responsible for just 0.8 percent of global greenhouse emissions but is also one the most vulnerable countries to extreme weather caused by climate change.
Pakistani foreign office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch differed with majority of these experts, saying a large number of countries and international partners helped Pakistan during the relief phase.
“We have seen that there was an outpouring of support from countries around the world — developed countries and developing countries provided relief assistance, both in-kind and financial assistance,” she said at a press briefing this week.
Baloch said the country had now gone into a recovery, rehabilitation and reconstruction phase, for which the Conference on Climate-Resilient Pakistan was being held in Geneva.
“It will be an occasion for Pakistan to introduce its plan of reconstruction, rehabilitation and recovery in a climate-resilient manner,” she said, adding that it would be a multi-year process.
