Challenges and Opportunities of Multidimensional Slats of Sustainable Development in Pakistan

Abstract

Sustainable development is concerned with improving the welfare status of present generation without compromising the future one. A major chunk of the world is signatory of fulfilling 17 Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Pakistan is not an exception. This thought provoking effort is being executed to present some statistics and debate on Pakistan’s current status regarding multi-dimensional slats of sustainable development. Sustainable development consists of multi-dimensions and there is no single indicator which could be declared as enough to provide the complete information about all dimensions. To this end, multiple indicators are required to cover all dimensions of sustainable development. We are going to discuss seven different development indicators to estimate multi-dimensional sustainable development for Pakistan during period 2000 to 2018 with help of secondary data. The indicators which are used for analysis are ecological footprint, sustainable economic welfare index, environmental performance index, sustainable human development index, pollution sensitive human development index, green net national product and genuine saving. The investigation of such indicators is essential to assess sustainable development with precision and accuracy. The finding of green net national product and genuine saving indicators measure the economic sustainability and thereby predicts that during study period Pakistan is on path of weak sustainability. The indicators like sustainable human development index and sustainable economic welfare index which measure the social welfare and social sustainability, has also been improved during the said period. This indicates that Pakistan is on the path of weak sustainability. The pollution sensitive human development index shows no improvement in sustainability while the ecological footprint and environmental performance index predicating weakly unsustainability.  There is dire need of holistic policy efforts at national level to control population, CO₂ emission which indicates that the pollution sensitive human development index and ecological footprint show unsustainability in the economy. So for environmental sustainability’s fowling are policies interventions needed, and some are short run and some are long run. So for environmental sustainability there is need to decrease the pollution emission like GHG and CO₂ by using the following suggestions. Efficient uses of oil, multi-cropping in agriculture for high yield, imposing restrictions on consumption of oil, shift from private to public source of transportation, population control and environmental friendly energy production. A holistic basket of policies backed by workable implementation plan might be better approach rather than isolated policies across various sectors of the economy.