ISLAMABAD: In order to address climate change and mobilise finance, experts have called for reforms in the public and private sectors to rake in much-needed funds required to address climate change, particularly adaptation.
On the first day of DawnMedia’s Breathe Pakistan International Climate Change Conference, World Bank Global Director for Climate Change Valerie Hickey underscored the need for the removal of superfluous subsidies through policy reforms, such as mobilising domestic finance through taxes and expenditure. “…the mother of all policy reforms that will mobilise climate finance for which plumbing is absolutely critical is subsidies,” she said.
She alluded to a UN desertification moot in which it was revealed that $1 billion per day was needed to combat drought and desertification whereas $2 billion per day in agriculture subsidies was being doled out. She said these subsidies were counter-productive. She said globally there were subsidies to the tune of $1.5 trillion in the energy, agriculture, and fisheries alone, while calling for subsidy reforms.
