Prime Minister Imran Khan listed Pakistan’s feats to fight climate change in his virtual address to the Climate Ambition Summit 2020 to mark the fifth anniversary of the signing of the landmark Paris Agreement.

 “Sixty per cent of all energy produced in Pakistan will be clean or renewable by 2030 and 30 per cent of all vehicles would be transferred to electricity as the country aims to limit its carbon emission,” he said. The premier added: “Pakistan has already scrapped two coal power-based projects which were supposed to produce 2,600 megawatts of energy and replaced them with hydroelectricity.

"As far as our indigenous coal goes, we have decided to produce energy either by coal to liquid or coal to gas so we do not have to burn coal to produce energy. Pakistan is a country whose contribution to global emission is less than one per cent but it is the fifth most vulnerable country due to climate change.” 

He said that his government has decided to have a nature-based solution to mitigate the effects of climate change and Pakistan has planned to plant 10 billion trees in the next three year. The premier said: "We've also increased the number of national parks and the protected areas from 30 to 45, at the same time we have decided to not have any power based on coal. Pakistan would be doing its best to make its contribution to mitigate the effects of climate change.”

Apart from PM Imran who was the 7th speaker, co-conveners UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron, as well as China’s President Xi Jinping, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, Chilean President Sebastian Pinera and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are scheduled to address the summit.

The conference is aimed at highlighting the fast-growing coalition of countries, cities, regions, businesses and investors, committing to net-zero emissions and boosting ambition in climate finance, and resilience and adaptation.

More than 110 countries have already committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2050. An official statement read: “The summit is a major step on the road to the next UN Climate Conference, COP26, which will be hosted by the UK next November in Glasgow. It will provide leaders with a global platform to showcase commitments to tackle climate change.”

The summit will also be giving a platform to the business, sub-national governments and civil society, including youth, indigenous and faith-based climate champions. The Paris accord, adopted in 2015 and signed a year later, is designed to boost greenhouse-gas-emissions mitigation worldwide. Its main goals include keeping the global average temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and efforts to limit warming to 1.5 degrees in a bid to reduce the impact and risks of climate change.

The last five years have been the warmest on record, according to the World Meteorological Organisation, a UN agency, with concern at rising numbers of wildfires, storms and flooding.