Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari says that Pakistan must adapt to climate change to survive.
ADVERTISEMENTA politician vying to be the next Prime Minister of Pakistan has vowed to invest in climate resilience if he wins next month.
PM hopeful Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari was foreign minister at the time of the devastating floods that killed more than 1,700 people in 2022.
He had been ready to quit the government because there were no new climate-resilience projects announced in the federal budget that followed this catastrophic event.
“I was ready to leave,” he told the Associated Press (AP) on Wednesday, adding it was only after he threatened to quit that some projects were included.
The country is two weeks away from parliamentary elections, but so far only Bhutto-Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party has made climate adaptability and resilience key pledges in its platform.
How bad were Pakistan’s 2022 floods?
Unprecedented downpours, worsened by global heating, washed away homes and schools while displacing hundreds of thousands of people in 2022.
An international donors’ conference in Geneva last year pledged billions of dollars, but parts of the country still feel the aftermath.
Speaking to AP in Nurpur Noon village in eastern Punjab province this week, Bhutto-Zardari said he regretted that climate change and its impact on Pakistan are not a greater part of public and political discourse.
He said more needs to be done to communicate climate change and its impact to Pakistanis - and urged fellow politicians to take the issue more seriously.
He said he was “shocked, horrified, livid and furious at the callous attitude” of lawmakers for not including climate resilience in the budget after the flooding.
He said he didn’t know who would come to Pakistan’s aid if there were floods in the future and the state wasn’t funding such projects itself.
“Pakistan must invest in climate resilience for its survival. Climate change is an existential threat. People will face floods and then perpetual droughts. We have to convince the people of Pakistan of the crisis this is.”
When is Pakistan’s general election and who else is in the race?
Earlier Wednesday, Bhutto-Zardari addressed an election rally in the nearby agricultural and industrial town of Bhalwal. Some in the crowd held up pictures of his mother, two-time Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated at a rally in 2007.
His grandfather is another former prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was executed in 1979 after being deposed in a coup. Zulfikar and Benazir still command loyalty and reverence among the party’s supporters.
Although the family has dominated Pakistani politics for decades, Bhutto-Zardari needs to defeat another dynasty, the Sharifs, if he wants to lead the next government.
It’s a tough task given that he won his first parliamentary seat in 2018 and only entered the Cabinet after Imran Khan was ousted as prime minister and his successor, Shehbaz Sharif, the brother of Nawaz, gave Bhutto-Zardari the foreign minister role.
But Khan, a former cricketer who contested his first national elections in 2013 and became prime minister in 2018, is missing from this year’s fray.
He is in prison following a corruption conviction, bogged down by legal cases, and barred from contesting the 8 February polls, when 266 parliamentary seats are up for grabs with a further 70 reserved for women and minorities.
ADVERTISEMENTHis power base is spread out in eastern Punjab province and northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, opening up the possibility for Bhutto-Zardari and the Sharifs to snap up any undecided voters.
The three main parties, including Khan’s, are fielding about the same number of candidates.
But a national rights group has already said the vote is unlikely to be free and fair because of pre-poll rigging.
Bhutto-Zardari played down these concerns, saying that every Pakistani election has had challenges and that this vote has them as well.
The AP has requested an interview with his rival, three-time former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, but has not received a response.
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