Climate change, environmental awareness and challenges

Sahibzada Moazzam Qureshi
Environmental pollution is not only a problem for a single region, city, nation or country, but every individual, and government in the world is responsible for this serious issue. The manner in which efforts should be coordinated and sustained for environmental awareness are being practiced, particularly; in the now, developing countries. While the international community has presented environmental pollution and climate change as serious threats, the government in our country is stating and translating the traditional trends, international laws and making announcements which are based on practical grounds. Government institutions and private sectors have documented the measures that have to be stressed upon and implementation is in process. It could be said that certain speeches we hear seem, environment-friendly, while the activities we see are hazardous to the environment. On the other hand, from a Federal to a Provincial outlook there are institutions present to take care of the environment, laws and regulations have also been made and targets have been determined but the organisation responsible for the implementation of environmental laws has room for improvement and training while the staff from the head, to the personnel assigned to fieldwork require technicality and quick witted-ness. Instead of working on implementation of a few provisions of the law, the primary focus is to improve the social status of our environment. At this point in time the biggest problem our society faces is that there are many diverse aspects of environmental pollution that require our government’s utmost priority. Every aspect falls under a different institution with conflicting laws such as municipalities, forests, wildlife, drought, famine ,etc which lead to chaos. For example, the institution for environmental protection is also responsible for the environmental pollution caused by waste but only municipalities and non-government organisations have a right to take action and can be held accountable. Similarly; our Public Health, Water Board and Municipal Committees are responsible for water-borne diseases and pollution. However, it becomes extremely difficult to make them accountable as no solution can be seen to control the waste materials discarded from hospitals but a list of institutions like Health Care Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, and Solid Waste Board share the responsibility to control and regulate it without any assigned deadline for accountability. Plastic plays a huge role in polluting the environment and damaging the climate. The laws for the ban of plastic have been made by the Environmental Protection Agency while the local council is also responsible for its implementation. Factories of plastic require fossil fuels as well as hard labour. Approximately one million plastic water bottles are bought every minute and about five trillion plastic bags are used in the world every year. Forty million tons of plastic are used every year and half of the products are used only once and then disposed. To put the damage numerically, plastic takes 1000 years to decompose unlike other ordinary waste materials. Although the lack of implementation of environment-friendly laws around the world have led to immense increase in infections and diseases. Currently the government allocates a huge budget for the health sector although diseases continue to prevail. Lack of awareness is the primary reason for there are numerous reasons for environmental pollution and even more for the ineffective implementation of environmental laws which are outdated. Recently, Pakistan has seen the most hazardous effects of climate change when the floods hit, millions of families and lives were affected. There was a huge loss of lives, land, infrastructure, homes and employment. Moreover, floods yield water-borne diseases, shortage of food and water resources. Which affected our Pakistani citizens the most since we happen to be a third world county. Natural disasters such as floods and storms destroyed the entire infrastructure including the water supply system. Apart from this, stagnant water creates mosquitoes that spread malaria, dengue and other epidemic diseases.