Climate, poverty and Pakistan

The world has faced two major challenges at the beginning of the 21st century the issue of climate change and the ever-increasing poverty. However, time and again, people have failed to see that these two issues are intrinsically linked. Both challenges have a great correlation because the policymakers cannot continue human development at the expense of damaging environment and fuelling climate change. However, the sad reality is that even after having significant data most policymakers still focus exclusively either on how to protect the environment or how to tackle poverty.
So at the eve of the global climate summit in Paris a study, titled "Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty," by the World Bank warns that the high-temperature caused by the greenhouse emissions has a potential to send more than 100 million people back into poverty by 2030. The hard news according to the report is that Pakistan is among those countries where the effect of climate change would reduce the income of the bottom 40 percent by more than 8 percent.
The report rightfully argues that the rising temperature and other disasters related to climate change play havoc with livelihoods and food security and these factors become the main reason the people who are more vulnerable to poverty get in danger to fall back. Impacts on agriculture have seen as the main culprit to cause poverty.
The natural disasters send supply shocks by destroying crops and seed reserves along with diminishing productive assets in agricultural communities. Pakistan has witnessed these issues after the unprecedented floods of 2010. On the other hand health effects are the second strongest driver of poverty. According to the report, the people with malaria could reach to 150 million or 5 percent of world population if nothing is done. It is worth mentioning here that in an another report , the World Bank last month projected the number of people living in poverty with extreme hardships at 702 million in 2015; this comes up to about 9.6 percent of global population.
However, this new projection of poverty is good news compared to the 902 million people, or 12.8 percent of the population, who were in poverty in 2012. The current reduction in the World Bank's projection brings the World a step closer to the goal of ending poverty by 2030. But, the rapid climate change threatens the goal quite significantly and as Dr. Yong Kim, the Bank's president attributed "Climate change hits the poorest the hardest, and our challenge now is to protect tens of millions of people from falling into extreme poverty because of a changing climate,". According to the Ministry of Finance, Pakistan in the last five years has suffered a loss of $14.6 billion due to the natural disasters and floods in the country.
Nevertheless, this report and many others over the years have pointed out that unless the climate change and its effects on poverty are managed properly it will be close to impossible to eradicate either of these issues. Pakistan is rather quickly becoming a country where climate change vulnerability to natural disasters is increasing. However, what can you expect from a government that has no climate minister in its cabinet and only moves when international pressure comes to it. On the other hand, non-governmental organisations also have nothing to show in this regards. Unless Pakistan gets a genuine partnership between public and private sector, the road ahead seems a long one.