Statement delivered by H.E. Muhammad Aurangzeb, Minister for Finance and Revenue, Pakistan
V20 MINISTERIAL DIALOGUE XII
16 April 2024
Washington D.C., USA
H.E. Muhammad Aurangzeb, Minister for Finance and Revenue, Pakistan
Thank you, Chair, Excellencies.
As you are well aware, given the floods and the devastation that it caused in 2022, where 33 million citizens of Pakistan got affected, 16 million children, it was a wakeup call certainly from the country’s perspective.
If you recall, the UN Secretary General actually described it as climate carnage. And the relief, rescue, rehabilitation efforts required and still require a little north of $16 billion. So these are large numbers. It was really, keeping this in mind that, you know, the point that was made earlier that V20 came up with a joint voice in terms of asking the developed economies to scale up their efforts to provide additional financing, technology transfer, and capacity building assistance to the developing countries. And keeping that in mind, Pakistan, couple of years back, as Chair of the Group of 77 and China, galvanized support for establishment of the Loss and Damage Fund in COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh first having it placed on the agenda of the conference, and then pushing for a consensus agreement.
Indeed, COP28 in Dubai last year adopted the decision on the operationalization of the Loss and Damage Fund. So we essentially need to look at all options with respect to the deputation finance. Again, the point that was made earlier is spot on. Most of us, and it’s mentioned here, are not in the — on the meeting side, it’s really we get afflicted and therefore require a lot of help on the deputation side. So everything that is out there in terms of the optionalities, whether it’s from the private sector, whether it’s from the World Bank Group, in general, we need to continue to look for additional optionalities, and the Climate Prosperity Plan. And I understand the Minister from Bangladesh is going to recount the success that they’ve had in that context. And we will certainly look to see if we can do labor success transfer in Pakistan is going to be quite critical. So we learn from each other as well as we move forward
As a country, we are very focused, we are very committed to all the green initiatives, rolling out the green taxonomy in the country, so that we can indeed tap all options from various sources around climate finance.
Thank you, Chair.
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