Indo-Pak Track II dialogue on building climate resilience: Energy-Water resilience and disaster risk reduction

Heinrich Böll Stiftung (HBF), Development Alternatives (DA) and the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), organized an India-Pakistan Track II dialogue on building climate resilience on the 12th and 13th of May, 2016 in New Delhi. Civil society, government and academic representatives from both India and Pakistan participated in this dialogue.

Climate change was picked as the theme for these dialogues owing to its cross-border nature. As India and Pakistan share common vulnerabilities to climate change and are similarly affected by it, they are also likely to benefit from a collective response. The last dialogue that took place in Pakistan in 2012 focused on informing and supporting collective efforts by the two countries to deal with climate change and discussed how cooperation on this issue provided an opportunity to improve relations.

 

The specific objectives of this dialogue were:

 

To encourage cross-sharing of ideas, perspectives and views across the two countries by leading experts of the representative nations on the common issues pertaining to climate impacts, energy and water security and disaster resilience.

 

To emerge with a formal solution-based exchange platform that can showcase realization of emerging technologies, innovations, and policies that could prove to be vital in the climate change adaptation process.

 

The Track-II discussions in New Delhi in May, 2016 identified core areas of collaborative research, good practice documentation and knowledge and information sharing systems that would contribute to building resilience to climate impact amongst the vulnerable communities, capacities in institutional systems to respond to increasing incidents of natural disasters; and develop greater understanding towards downstream communities and solutions for cooperation between downstream and upstream communities.