Pakistan was yesterday set to ask for billions in international support for its recovery from the aftermath of last year’s devastating floods and to help it better resist climate change.
To meet its huge needs, Pakistan and the UN were cohosting an international conference in Geneva, Switzerland, to urge countries, organizations and businesses to step up with financial and other support for a long-term recovery and resilience plan.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres were to launch the one-day event, which was also to feature speeches by heads of state and government.
Photo: AP
French President Emmanuel Macron, his Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen were also to address the conference via video link.
According to Pakistan’s Resilient Recovery, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Framework, which it was planning to officially present at Monday’s conference, US$16.3 billion would be needed in all.
Pakistan’s government aims to cover half that amount with “domestic resources,” including its development budget and through public-private partnerships, but it is looking to the international community to cover the remainder, with the hope that yesterday’s conference would generate significant pledges of support.
About 450 participants from about 40 countries have registered for the event, including representatives of the World Bank and several multilateral development banks.
“The waters may have receded, but the impacts are still there,” UN Development Programme Administrator Achim Steiner said ahead of the conference, describing the floods as “a cataclysmic event.”
“There is a massive reconstruction and rehabilitation effort that needs to be undertaken,” he said.
The flooding, which killed more than 1,700 people and affected about 33 million others, still has not receded in some southern parts of the country.
Millions of people remain displaced, and those who have been able to go home are often returning to damaged or destroyed homes and mud-covered fields that cannot be planted.
Food prices have soared, and the number of people facing food insecurity has doubled to 14.6 million, UN figures showed.
The World Bank has estimated that up to 9 million more people could be dragged into poverty as a result of the flooding.
Pakistan and the UN have said that the event would be broader than a traditional pledging conference, as it aims to set up a long-term international partnership focused on recovery, but also on boosting Pakistan’s climate resilience.
Pakistan, with the world’s fifth-largest population, is responsible for less than 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but is one of the most vulnerable nations to extreme weather caused by global warming.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty on Saturday descended on Cairo to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and wars in neighboring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a news conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a
RSS