Lahore’s Punjab University (PU) is going to set up a climate research laboratory to look into accelerating climatic changes in the country, for which the Higher Education Commission (HEC) has approved Rs100 million funding.
As per the details, the lab will run under the supervision of Department of Space Science Director Ziaul Haq while Sahida Adeela Batool will act as the co-principal investigator along with faculty members such as Khalid Mehmood and Salman Tariq.
Ziaul Haq explained that “climatic change can trigger social inequalities and also increase social factors that lead to conflicts, displacement, changes in migration pattern and instability in the country”.
“If proper measures aren’t taken in time, extreme weather events like temperature rise, flooding, drought, yield reduction, the spread of infectious diseases, deforestation and water scarcity will hit Pakistan.”
He further explained that “the purpose of establishing the lab is because Pakistan does not possess high technical, professional and financial capacity to adapt, prevent or lessen the adverse impacts of climate change”.
Satellite data and GIS analysis can provide cheap easy to adopt alternatives for the locals to adapt so that climatic changes can be prevented in due time.
