Federal, provincial governments should work together for air quality framework: Marriyum

ISLAMABAD Sept 18 (APP): Minister of State
for Information, Broadcasting and National Heritage Marriyum
Aurangzeb said on Monday that the federal and provincial
governments should work together for evolving the Air Quality
Framework as well as to ensure pollution-free environment which
was the top most priority of the democratic government.
She said that that the environment
protection agencies under the ministry of Climate Change, NGOs
and civil society could also play a pro-active role in achieving
this objective.
The minister made these observations while
speaking at a round table consultation meeting on the role of the
parliament in meeting the clean air challenges.
She said that the issue needed support of a
better legislative mechanism evolved through consultations with
all the stakeholders and necessary guidance could also be sought
from the legislative models orchestrated by the other regional
countries on the environmental issues. The minister of state
said that the parliament could render a significant role
in realizing sustainable development goals.
Marriyum said that though after the
18th amendment the subjects of Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGS) and clean air had become the responsibility of the
provinces but the federal and provincial governments would have
to make collaborative efforts in meeting the challenges related
to environment.
Dilating on the SDGS the minister said that the
Speaker National Assembly Ayaz Sadiq in recognition of the
importance of its objectives had established a secretariat in
the Pakistani parliament in 2013, which has due representation of
all the political parties.
Marriyum claimed that Pakistan’s
parliament was the only one legislature in the world which had a
full-fledged Task Force on the SDGS. The Secretariat, she said ,
had been collecting comprehensive data on all the 17 subjects of
the SDGS and cooperating with the provincial task forces, which
also have been striving hard for the achievement of the those
goals.
The minister revealed that from among the provincial task
forces, best results had been exhibited by Balochistan Task Force
working under the stewardship of Raheela Durrani. She said that
the SDGS secretariat was also assisting the parliament in the
legislative process and making budgetary allocations.
The minister while underscoring the need for
availability of relevant indigenous data on the development
goals, which was essential in attaining SDGS, spotlighted the
importance of capacity building and use of modern technologies in
meeting the development targets.
She also emphasized the
imperative of capacity building of the local institutions
observing that local expertise was vital for the process of
evolution.
Marriyum said that since many goals of the SDGS
were correlated the government had integrated various ministries
in the process of achieving sustainable development goals adding
that Vision-2025 also had an important role to play in this
regard.