In a bid to finance its renewable energy projects, Pakistan is about to launch its first Green Bond to informed Special Assistant on Climate Change Amin Aslam has said.

Addressing a ceremony in Islamabad on Monday, Aslam said that this 500 million Euro bond will be launched by WAPDA as a Green Bond. “Pakistan is also a country which is about to launch its first green Bond in the market to finance our renewable energy transition,” he said.

The Special Assistant informed that the incumbent government is trying to pilot a ‘Nature Bond’ which can “link the retirement of sovereign debt with quantifiable nature performance.”

“The associated issue with the nature-based recovery is that we need to develop a financing framework which can help this ecosystem restoration decade and that financing framework shall be different from the framework of the last decade as the framework will not work in the next decade of ecosystem restoration,” he said.

The Special Assistant said the present government is giving special emphasis to the protection of the environment. He said the one billion tree tsunami project in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was a complete success and now the federal government is executing the ten billion tree Tsunami project.

He said this project is also providing thousands of jobs to the youth.

He informed that the government is working at a global level on different ideas with institutions like the World Bank on natural capital valuation i.e. trying to value nature properly. “We can only protect nature if we can value it properly, and integrate that value to mainstream decision making,” he said.