Rising to the heatwave challenge

For staunch advocates of sustainability, conservation, and green technologies, a marked change in temperatures world over should be a significant cause for alarm. As extreme temperatures break records, and heatwaves sweep major regions of the world, South Asia – particularly Pakistan – needs to derive promising lessons to prepare for the future. “The negative trend in climate will continue at least until the 2060s, independent of our success in climate mitigation,” warned Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General of the UN’s weather agency last week.

These stark warnings should merit a rethink of what is actually at stake in the coming years. On the health front in Pakistan, acute cases of kidney injury, diarrhoea and gastroenteritis have picked up on the back of scotching heat, and mortality attributable to heatstroke may increase too. It is a positive step by the serving government to put together a task force that can devise strategies necessary to mitigate adverse impacts of climate change, headlined by the substantial heat challenges facing the country.

From the perspective of an action plan, Pakistan is fortunate to be surrounded by a neighbour that has balanced climate change goals with innovative technological solutions, making it imperative to draw lessons and cultivate gradual expertise. Look no further than the climate friendly solutions implemented during China’s own international Olympics games: hundreds of hydrogen-fuelled vehicles served as welcome indicators of a broader decarbonization pivot in key Chinese sectors, inspiring pathways for change elsewhere in the world, including Pakistan. Renewable-powered Olympic venues, technology-driven air quality improvement, and artificial snowmaking built on sustainable sourcing, all speak to the many strengths of making climate friendly interventions a multi-year process. That process can benefit Pakistan through more information-sharing with its ally, and reinforce progress towards UN 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda – a stated priority from Islamabad on the world stage.

Pakistan should also take these severe heatwave warnings, as well as record-setting temperatures within its borders, to prepare the ground for a longer-term “carbon-neutral” focus. To Islamabad’s credit, several non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and government-backed partnerships on green transitions have been received positively by environmentalists, but we lack a vision to localize that carbon-neutral transition across multiple administrations. The need of the hour is to take provincial governments’ modest capacity building into consideration, and ensure all public hospitals have adequate stockpile of supplies to counter the risks of scorching heat and associated illnesses.

But limiting Pakistan’s overall exposure to those extreme temperatures is where the focus should be long-term. Complacency cannot be a course of action when the forecasts are this grim. Consider the telling report published by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN-ESCAP): it warned that climate change will affect the lives and livelihoods of population segments reliant on dryland agriculture in South and Southwest Asia, making Pakistan’s make-up critical to prioritize.

A starting point could be to begin with specific economic sectors that have the potential to move from high-carbon energy sources to more eco-friendly sources, as some nations in the broader Asia show. It is also high-time to challenge the assumption that there is astronomical cost involved in giving carbon neutral interventions a head start in Pakistan. If anything, a starting point for this transition will lessen future costs for businesses, energy sectors, and daily consumers, when sustainable energy stands to become more pricey, and difficult to adapt to (once challenges multiply).

Recent months have shown that Pakistan, despite being a climate vulnerable country, has been spared the perils of mass deaths from scorching heatwaves. As best-selling science writer David Wallace-Wells rightly observes in the New York Times, an early estimate of the death toll was just 90 across Pakistan and neighbouring India. That is “a fraction of the more than 1,000 killed by the heat dome that struck the Pacific Northwest (including western Canada) last summer, where lower temperatures hit millions for a much shorter period of time.”

In Pakistan’s case, if brutal heatwaves are the new normal in the decades to come, then investigating the evolving relationship between extreme temperatures and death rates can serve a much-needed purpose: help the government determine which regions and localities it ought to prioritize based on exposure. Nations have accomplished plenty through such incremental approach. Going back to China’s example, Beijing initiated an entire process based on its core strength – technology – to ensure that venues of international focus were powered by one hundred percent renewable energy.

This didn’t happen overnight, and Pakistan should take comfort in the fact that its own strength is more administrative than technology. That is a good sign because climate-friendly interventions should be tailored to localities that are most at risk of heatwaves going forward, making it a test case for Pakistan to administer buffers against heatwaves as it did against the COVID-19 pandemic. Ensuring buy-in from all major parties in the country on this critical challenge should be the defining goal to unite in this national effort, and rise to the challenge of scorching heat.

Ultimately, Pakistan’s incredible advances on reducing its carbon footprint is compelling proof that the country can also work to limit vulnerabilities against heatwaves, before resources and international support become even more rare. Ending the spell of heatwaves would be wishful thinking, given rising intensities world over. But as the United Nations itself makes clear, the best solution still is to be very ambitious on tackling the causes of global warming.

That can be done to the best of Pakistan’s ability, considering legitimate constraints. But the key is to prepare the ground on some level at least, and that too well ahead of time.

The writer is a foreign affairs commentator and recipient of the Fulbright Award