ISLAMABAD: Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif agreed on Thursday to partner with the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) to develop carbon-credit projects and expand access to climate financing, during a meeting with the institute’s leadership on the sidelines of the COP30 summit in Brazil.
An independent intergovernmental organization, GGGI was launched in Rio de Janeiro during a United Nations conference on sustainable development in 2012 and works with developing countries to design climate-finance projects and operationalize carbon-market instruments.
The collaboration comes as Punjab faces intensifying climate stresses, including its worst monsoon floods this year and a prolonged smog crisis that has forced school closures in recent years and caused respiratory diseases.
“GGGI will help strengthen Pakistan’s capacity in global carbon markets and carbon financing and assist the country in gaining access to carbon markets worldwide,” the Punjab administration said in a statement circulated after the chief minister’s meeting with the organization’s director general, Sang-Hyup Kim.
It said that GGGI offered to convert the present administration’s climate-improvement initiatives into carbon credits to develop green-growth projects.
“GGGI will also support Punjab in establishing carbon-credit programs at the provincial level,” it added.
Global carbon markets allow countries and companies to trade carbon credits, which are like certificates earned by projects that cut or remove emissions.
The sellers are usually developing countries or organizations running activities like reforestation, clean energy or pollution-control projects. The buyers are countries or companies that still produce emissions and need a way to meet their climate targets.
They purchase these credits to balance out the pollution they cannot eliminate. The system works because the atmosphere is shared, with a ton of emissions reduced in Pakistan having the same effect on the climate as a ton reduced in Europe or the United States.
The statement said the chief minister told the GGGI official that Punjab plans to move forward on green-financing proposals tied to air-quality mitigation, water and sanitation, reforestation and e-mobility, saying these areas would form the backbone of the province’s climate-resilience strategy.
It added that the GGGI director general appreciated the Punjab administration’s commitment to environmental improvement, hoping that the partnership would help advance sustainable development goals.
