Existential threats, and need for 10-year economic, environmental, and epidemiological plan

The federal minister for planning and development, Ahsan Iqbal, reportedly indicated that the Prime Minister will soon launch a five-year economic plan.

It needs to be understood that given the existential threat of climate change, and related to it the ‘Pandemicene’ phenomenon, along with the immense rise in the density, and extent of smog – a phenomenon also related with factors, like release of carbon dioxide that positively influence global warming, and in turn climate change – any economic plan will need to accompany a well-knitted environmental, and epidemiology policy.

The economic plan itself needs to be strongly footed in a non-neoliberal framework, and one that is not focused on austerity policies that remain over-board in their approach, whereby there is a lopsided focus on squeezing aggregate demand, and less focus on aggregate supply, and within it institutional quality determinants while overall dealing with the issue of macroeconomic stability, economic growth, inequality, and poverty.

Hence, it is important that any plan to deal with economic issues has equally strong focus on environment, and epidemiology; a lesson that strongly came out of the experience of years of fast-unfolding nature of climate change crisis – for instance, the catastrophic flooding in 2022, and similarly disaster of similar magnitudes around the world happening with far more increasing intensity, and frequency – and a related crisis in the shape of spread of zoonotic diseases that saw, for instance, the transition of coronavirus epidemics – SARS and MERS – since the start of the millennium to reaching the state of Covid pandemic with clear indication that as global warming continues significant threat of more pandemics can occur.

Be that as it may, the state of health sector remains very weak, and ill-prepared to deal with the ‘Pandemicene’ phenomenon. For instance, serious lack of capacity to prepare a vaccine to deal with Covid pandemic, and a weak multilateral spirit meant that vaccination could only be rolled out at a much less pace than many middle-income countries like India, which was far ahead in the ladder to prepare vaccines. This also kept the country on weaker trajectory to come out of the economic crisis that the pandemic had created not to mention the benefits of having vaccine earlier in terms of life itself in the first place in the country.

Therefore, it is essential that economic planning internalizes health sector planning, and in particular epidemiology, which basically focuses on building the public health sector that not only better controls the spread of disease but also strengthens the institutional, organizational and markets, serving the public sector to prevent diseases in the first place, including enhancing the capacity to manufacture vaccines. Moreover, enhancement in capacity to locally manufacture vaccines, for instance, also reduces pressures on the balance of payment by putting lesser pressure on import payments.

At the same time, the fast-closing window of keeping average annual temperature globally below 1.5C, a threshold after which there is strong consensus of science that climate change crisis will have permanent impact in terms of changing the climate in ways that will be irreversible.

In this regard, there is wide consensus among scientists that the world has around a decade before this threshold of global warming will be breached. Given Pakistan is among the top-ten climate change challenged countries, and which has a huge population of glaciers, and where rising temperatures are adding to the issue of smog, that has seen half of its most population dense province, Punjab submerged into smog that is well-beyond the hazardous limits as defined by air-quality index internationally, with cities like Lahore – the city frequently topping the chart of being the most polluted city in the world a number of times in recent weeks – and Multan seeing the ‘IQAir’ index reach levels of around 2000 on a number of days during November this year for instance, when the hazardous zone in terms of air quality begins after 300!

A recently released report ‘Chief Minister Punjab’s roadmap for smog mitigation in Punjab’ by the Government of Punjab indicated that during roughly five-and-a-half years, that is from January 2019 to August 2024, there were only 28 days (or around one month) which fell in the zone of having good air quality in Lahore. Alarm bells were being raised with regard to the serious negative consequences of smog.

For instance, the writer in his September 3, 2021 published article ‘Tackling air pollution’ in this newspaper had pointed out from ‘Air Quality Life Index, September 2021, Annual Update’ report that ‘As per the Report’s factsheet on Pakistan, Pakistan is today the world’s fourth most polluted country.

Air pollution shortens the average Pakistani’s life expectancy by 3.9 years, relative to what it would have been if the World Health Organisation (WHO) guideline was met. Some areas of Pakistan fare much worse than average with air pollution shortening lives by almost 7 years in the most polluted regions. All of Pakistan’s 228 million people live in areas where the annual average particulate pollution level exceeds the WHO guideline as well as Pakistan’s own air quality standard of 15 µg/m³.’ The situation has only dramatically worsened since then.

This identifies not only a very lukewarm attitude of the governments – both at the provincial and federal levels – the breadth and depth of focus is also very limited, given action plans being presented remain disjointed in terms of bringing in combined focus from the lens of economy, environment, epidemiology, and micro-level, lagging not only meaningful timelines – like for instance followed in Beijing – but an over-arching policy with buy-in from all-of-government, and opposition parties remains missing, with the result that much-needed, well-capacitated institutional, governance, and incentive structures to approach the problem in a purpose-driven, mission-oriented way has not been reached.

Moreover, an overarching policy is needed at the country level that brings in the needed triple focus of economy, environment, and epidemiology to create a much-needed unified emphasis on these overlapping issues in a harmonious and mission-oriented way. Therefore, it is indeed important that the economic plan is complemented with an environment and epidemiology policy that takes a revisionist approach from the one being followed under the influence of ‘Chicago boys’, and under International Monetary Fund (IMF) programmes, which is of the nature of being neoliberal, austerity-based, and pro-cyclical policy, with little role of public sector, and limited regulation of markets, not to mention that such policy has seriously back-fired may that be the Global Financial Crisis 2007-08, the rise in inequality and indebtedness globally, including Pakistan.

Also, given the enormity of task at hand, the government should prepare a plan for ten years, and for smooth continuation of the plan beyond the change of governments, the plan should be prepared in inclusive way for ‘three Es’ that is economy, environment, and epidemiology with signatory buy-in from the federal government, provincial governments, and the largest possible consensus of the opposition parties along with bringing on board at least main bilateral and multilateral partners.

Moreover, the policy should encompass needed reform in the institutional, organizational, and market structures in the light of non-neoliberal approach with focus on governance and incentive structures at each level. Also, the need for economic diplomacy should also be internalized in the ‘three Es’ plan, especially with regard to attracting a meaningful level of climate finance – including creating advocacy for receiving International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) climate change-related special drawing rights (SDRs) allocation on a yearly basis and for at least over the medium-term – and in better management of external debt pressures.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024

The article, originally published November 15, 2024, was updated on November 21, 2024 to incorporate a change in the third paragraph.