ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Saturday said after the Paris agreement, governments had to recognise the existential threat climate change posed to the security and future of the world.
According to a PM House statement, he said the government had been investing over a billion rupees in the Climate Change Division “to make sure we don’t gamble with the future of the world”.
Commenting on the national budget, he said the government for the past three years had been working tirelessly to improve the lives of the citizens of Pakistan and stabilise a nation that was in tatters.
“We inherited hyper-inflation and financial indiscipline of the highest degree, inhibiting the working class from living lives of dignity, and turned things around to cut our deficit by half, grow the GDP at a 4.7% per-annum rate, improve our balance of trade, bring inflation down to a 10-year low and bring tax collection up to historic levels.”
In the next fiscal year, the prime minister said, the government was committed to not only replicate this success, but one-up it. He said the government had chosen to invest in Gwadar because of its immense importance.
“We have created new subsidies and public investment in agriculture to help our agro-economy and the millions of Pakistanis, who depend on its success for a living,” he said.
He said that the government had also committed to investing in infrastructure, roads, railways and the Karachi-Lahore motorway, connecting the nation and creating thousands of direct and indirect jobs.
Nawaz said the government did increase the allocations in social welfare cash grants programmes like BISP, to make sure that millions of poor people, regardless of their income, can have lives of dignity and break the shackles of poverty.
“Finally, we have also invested in numerous power projects across the country to develop a country where livelihoods are no longer dependent on the whims of power outages,” he added.
