Islamabad: With the aim of enabling a safe environment and better climate, the two-day climate change conference titled ‘Breathe Pakistan International Conference on Climate Change’, kicked off in Pakisan’s capital with the aim of raising awareness and encouraging climate resilience and adaptation at all levels. The conference aims at bringing together leaders, experts, and innovators to collaborate on strategies that address the climate crisis while supporting economic growth and lessening the negative impact of climate change on the destinies of the most vulnerable segments of the population—the poor, women, and children.

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The two-day event, being held at the Jinnah Convention Centre in Islamabad, is divided into 15 sessions with more than 90 speakers from 11 countries and a host of climate change experts from the conference’s principal partner, the United Nations, and also from the World Bank.

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Pakistan’s Minister for Planning and Development, Ahsan Iqbal, told the conference that climate change is not some distant challenge but a lived reality. “We must move from awareness to impact, policy to execution, and from independent efforts to collective responsibility,” the minister stressed.

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“There will be too many people who die if we wait for the Global North to put on the table all of the money that they morally probably should,” said Valere Hickey, the global director for climate change at the World Bank, in his address.

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Addressing the event, Supreme Court senior puisne judge Justice Mansoor Ali Shah highlighted that the Hindu Kush Himalaya glaciers, which Pakistan relies upon, were melting at “alarming rates”. The judge said: “Climate change is no longer a distant threat—this needs to be understood—it is a present and escalating crisis, particularly for countries in the Global South, and my emphasis is going to be on the Global South today.”

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The conference is being attended by experts from the federal Ministry of Climate Change and from the strategic partner for the conference—the Government of Punjab—as well as those from other provinces and the corporate sector, both public and private.

Climate change experts from the South Asian region, including India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka, are also in Pakistan for the event.