KARACHI:Chairperson Planning and Development Board Sindh Ms. Naheed Durrani met with FAO Representative Mina Dowlatchahi to discuss the final steps to operationalize the approved climate resilient agriculture and water management project in Umerkot, Badin, and Shanghar districts of the Sindh province.
The Green Climate Fund (GCF) has provided FAO with a grant of nearly $35 million for this work, while the provincial governments of Punjab and Sindh have committed an additional $8 million and $4.7 million respectively, in co-financing to be managed by FAO. The project will also be implemented in five districts of Punjab over a period of six years.
The project will develop Pakistan’s capacity to collect the information it needs, and communicate it to relevant stakeholders to cope with the impacts of climate change on agriculture and water management by putting in place state-of-the art technology. It will also build farmers’ resilience through skills, knowledge and technology of climate-resilient approaches towards agriculture and water management.
“Thanks to support from the Green Climate Fund and the Government, the project will constitute an important step in a longer-term process of transforming agriculture and water management in both Sindh and Punjab, where changing climatic conditions will require significant alteration in practices across sectors” said FAO representative Mina Dowlatchahi.
“The project will focus on setting this transformational process in motion, and equip government, farmers and other stakeholders to continue driving this process beyond project closure, hence reducing vulnerability to climate change”, she added.
In Sindh, it is expected that 487,500 people from the rural areas (in about 75,000 households) will directly benefit from the GCF project. The results can later be scaled up by the government and the private sector as well, to 6 million people living in the districts the project will target, and to the 34 million rural people in Sindh overall.
Newsdesk