ISLAMABAD: United States (US) Ambassador to Pakistan, Donald Blome has said that the US-Pakistan Green Alliance Initiative was a critical and Significant component of the United States’ global contribution towards the goal of addressing climate change.
The US envoy said this here on Saturday while addressing the Pakistan U.S. Alumni Network’s (PUAN) two-day conference on “The Climate Change Emergency: Pakistan in the 21st Century and the Road to COP-28,” which was jointly organized by the PUAN and WWF-Pakistan.
Meanwhile, Donald Blome welcomed the participants of the PUAN national conference, adding that such events accommodated the right people to address the issue in an appropriate manner.
He apprised the participants that there were some 14 chapters of PUAN functional in different countries, and all the members were selected due to their innovative skills. Over 800 nationals were selected due to their commitment to addressing climate change, he went on to say.
The US envoy stressed upon the PUAN alumni to support and advance U.S.-Pakistan Green Alliance across Pakistan, adding that the Alliance envisioned the history of U.S. support to Pakistan’s green revolution in 1960 and its hydropower schemes at that time which helped in revolutionizing its agriculture sector.
He further said that the U.S. was supporting agriculture innovation, climate-smart agriculture, renewable energy transformation and climate advocacy, and others.
Role of US-Pak Green Alliance
Blome said that the Green Alliance provided Pakistan with a tremendous opportunity to explore new opportunities and avenues in the private sector for augmenting its climate resilience.
He informed that the U.S. was supporting Pakistan’s Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS)’s initiative of electric vehicles (EV) production project to help develop Pakistan it’s indigenous production capacity to achieve its ambitious target of converting its 30% vehicles over EVs by 2030.
The Ambassador informed that his team had developed many key collaborations between the U.S. and Pakistani universities in multidisciplinary domains.
Earlier, Country Director PUAN, Sahibzada Aamir Khalil, in his opening remarks welcomed the guests and the participants at the forum. In his remarks, he said that Climate Change was no longer a dissenting threat but a reality adding that the forums like PUAN were striving for a sustainable future for the coming generations as climate change incurred damages to all sectors from food security, bio-health to biodiversity.
Director General Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF-Pakistan) Hammad Naqi Khan, in his keynote address, said the Fund had been continuously advocating that the climate crisis was a national crisis in Pakistan.
