Any payment of "climate compensation" to Pakistan must begin with an assessment of the costs incurred by Pakistan in building its nuclear arsenal, and the consequences for its energy policies -Bhutto's Islamic bomb could not have come cheap

 by Ganesh Sahathevan

The Diplomat reported:

Pakistan’s foreign minister repeated calls for compensation for the unprecedented destruction caused to the country by this summer’s flooding, saying debt relief could be a mechanism for doing so.

Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari told The Associated Press on Wednesday at the U.N. climate summit in Egypt that the world is unequipped to deal with weather-related disasters of this scale and urged countries to find ways to address the issue.

Lost in Bhuto-Zardari's demand are two related and highly pertinent issues.

First, Bhutto-Zardari seems to have forgotten that it was his grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who set Pakistan on the path to becoming a nuclear power in the 70s, building an arsenal of "Islamic bombs"  regardless of the costs to the Paksitan economy which was then and remains, in effect, a basket case.

The energy sector remains so backward that  approximately 68% of Pakistan’s population depends on firewood as the main source of energy in households

In the words of the World Bank's Rahat Jabeen: 

Every year, Pakistan loses almost 27,000 hectares of natural forest area.

Based on this, Pakistan is in a state of ‘Green Emergency’.

This state of emergency has negatively impacted the rural population that relies on Pakistan’s forests for their livelihoods.

Along with changes in the ecosystem, this dependency has made them extremely vulnerable to the further degradation of forests – a large number of households and workers in this region could lose their vocation, skillset and habitat.

The impact of such extensive deforestation on floods in Pakistan including the most recent seems to have been forgotten by Bhutto-Zardari and others who seek  "climate change" compensation for Pakistan. Bhutto-Zardari also seems incapable, if not unwilling, to say how much more technologically advanced and efficient Pakistan's power generation system might be if the billions spent on building its nuclear arsenal had instead been diverted into its energy infrastructure. That needs to be the starting point of any discussion about compensation.

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