Punjab Green Development Program
Start & End Date: 2018-2025
Country/Countries: Pakistan
Multilateral Institution(s) Involved: World Bank
Pakistan, with a population of over 207 million people, is the world’s sixth most populous country. In recent years, it has achieved continued economic growth and substantially reduced poverty. At the same time, several factors, including rapid population growth, industrialization, urbanization, and motorization, have resulted in growing environmental degradation and pollution. Pollution is estimated to cause around 340,000 deaths per year in Pakistan, over 70 percent of which are due to air pollution. This represents a quarter of total annual deaths in the country, making Pakistan one of the world’s most affected countries. Hence, the World Bank is committing $728 million through four projects to put Pakistan on the path of climate resilient development which will benefit millions of its citizens. These projects will protect the environment and improve the quality of life in cities while being engines of growth and promoting sustainable water management through efficient irrigation, robust weather forecasting and improved disaster preparedness.
The Punjab Green Development Program Project for Pakistan will strengthen the province’s environmental management through empowering its environmental protection agencies to provide better services. It will help modernize laws and regulations and promote investments in cleaner technologies to reduce air and water pollution. Accordingly, the Program will cover two results areas: (a) strengthening environmental governance, and (b) promoting green investments. Activities under the first results area will aim to restructure the Environmental Protection Department (EPD), reform the environmental regulatory regime, and build the EPD’s capacity to deliver transparent and efficient environmental management services to the private sector and to the public. Activities under the second results area aim to promote selected green investments in both the public and private sectors and develop green financing schemes to finance such investments beyond the implementation period of this Program. Together, these efforts will help GoPunjab address pollution issues from the source, improve energy and resource efficiency in targeted sectors, and increase the green competitiveness of key industries.
As of October 2020, the projects has helped primarily to increase the volume of new public and private capital leveraged for green investments. Strengthened environmental governance, is starting to demonstrate results through increased monitoring of pollution and preparations for releasing pollution health advisories related to SMOG. Increased investment has taken place in energy efficient equipment to reduce green-house gas emissions in public buildings and strong capitalization of the proposed environment endowment fund is taking place.