Pakistan: Climate Change and Global Warming · Global Voices
Ambreen Salman

Every year the winters are shrinking and a few days of cold weather leaves us fresh and pleasant to face the scorching heat of the sun. This has left everyone in every possible field worried because this global warming will affect our life styles. The earth's climate is vibrant and always changing through a natural cycle. What the world is more concerned about is that the changes that are happening today have caught fire because of our very own deeds. These transformations are being studied by scientists through out the world in an attempt to find any evidence from tree rings, pollen samples, ice cores, and sea sediments. The causes of climate change can be categorized into two main categories – those that are due to natural causes and those that are twisted by man. The natural causes are continental drifts, volcanoes, and ocean currents accompanied by earth tilts, whereas the human factors range from bomb blasts and population outgrowth which is resulting in less and less greenery.
Effect of Climate change – shrinking Sar Lake and vanishing greenary in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan. Image by Flickr user NotMicroButSoft. Used under a Creative Commons License
Many Pakistani Bloggers have written about this Climate Change. In a post titled “Climate Change Cost Pakistan $3.5 Billion in 18 Years”  Karim Khan states:
Pakistan has huge reserves of coal that are used for running several industries on local scale in many areas. But emissions from coal persistently threaten the atmosphere with emissions that lead to escalating the greenhouse effect. The World Bank report mentions the Bank’s interest in developing hydropower capacity in Pakistan and Nepal. Also, it is suggested to import natural gas from the Middle East for industrial use instead of using coal, in order to protect the country from climate-related disaster.
Climate change has harshly endangered the natural habitats of much of the wildlife populations. Some of the rare birds species like the black throated thrush, finches, magpie and golden eagle have almost vanished as the local ecosystems have been futile to sustain their needs. Many species of wolf and fox and their natural habitats are also being endangered by the changing climate. The departure of vegetative covering, which has led to the migration of the Markhor and wild goats, has had ever negative implications for the elusive snow leopard, which, has now lost its critical food source.
Tahir Hameed at The Pakistani Spectator  writes in a post titled “Impending Global Warming and the world”:
Not only man but the survival of numerous plant and animal species is at stake. Imagine large arable tracts of land turning into deserts. Global warming is not only causing increases in temperatures but its causing the weather to become drier as well. The time is not far off. By the year 2025, more than 2.8 billion people living in forty eight nations will be facing water stress or water scarcity. Of these 48 nations, forty are in Near East, North Africa or in sub Saharan Africa.  It is thought that by the year 2050, the number of nations facing water stress or scarcity would have increased to fifty four and the population in these nations would be about 4 billion. That constitutes 40 percent of a projected population of 9.4 billion people.
In another post in the same blog Sher Ali says:
Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.
This climate change can be only delayed by adopting a few measures such as:
The objective is to bring global warming under control by restraining the discharge of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping “greenhouse” gases into the atmosphere.
Lead Pakistan, the nation's largest network of professionals on sustainable development, uploaded a two part series video in YouTube highlighting voices from Pakistan on climate change (Part 1, Part 2):
We can contribute to this global cause by taking personal measures. We can lend a hand instantaneously by becoming more energy efficient. Conserving and limiting our use of oil, gasoline and coal can set an example for others to pursue. If we do not do something now, we will leave a much larger crisis to our children. The good news is that, if we all join hands in stopping the climate change; we can decrease its impact on our lives, on our environment and on future generations.