Can Fighting Smog Be a Bridge in India-Pakistan Relations? (Al Jazeera) 

The Swiss group IQAir has compiled and analyzed data from 14 regional monitoring stations and declared Pakistan’s capital Lahore to be the world’s most polluted city. Last Wednesday, for instance, Lahore’s air quality index (AQI) score was 1165, which then  increased in a staggering fashion to 1900 AQI by the following Monday. India’s capital, New Delhi, was a close second for most-polluted city in the same survey, however. This cross-border pollution issue now has led government officials in both countries to reignite stagnant relations to pursue solutions. 

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) can significantly affect the country’s domestic and overseas energy transition and decarbonization agenda. Electricity projects in China’s BRI investments, contrary to popular impressions of being part of a monolithic “project of the century,” have divergent implications for the host country’s shift away from coal-based power plants.

Water provision is “more lucrative than drugs,” said one of the interviewees in our research in Karachi, Pakistan. Competition for control of the city’s water includes water mafias and formal institutions. As water becomes increasingly scarce due to ongoing climate changes in the Indus Basin, it is already a source of intense economic and political competition. If not addressed in time, water scarcity may deepen fault lines in this highly fractured, multi-ethnic, populous city.  

“From birth, from almost from cradle to grave, girls have been seen as some sort of baggage,” said Shamsa Suleiman, Project Management Specialist for Gender and Youth at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Tanzania. Suleiman spoke at a recent Wilson Center event with USAID MOMENTUM Country and Global Leadership about balancing power dynamics to achieve equity for all women and children in maternal, child, and adolescent health, and family planning. Home should be a safe space, said Suleiman. But for many girls, it no longer is. To escape the poverty and pressures at home, including early marriage and other forms of gender-based violence, some girls leave, said Suleiman. “Girls are trying to escape the safe spaces.”

Given that Pakistan is one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world, Washington shouldn’t write it out of the climate change cooperation script

The White House has announced the names of 40 world leaders invited by US President Joe Biden to participate in a virtual global climate summit on April 22-23. Many Pakistanis are unhappy – and with good reason – that Prime Minister Imran Khan isn’t on the list. 

“The pandemic has undoubtedly resulted in more deaths and more illness – particularly for the most vulnerable women and children,” write the authors of a new United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) report examining the direct and indirect effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Asia. The report found that the disruptions in several essential health services due to the COVID-19 pandemic had a “substantial impact” on maternal and child mortality in the region.

“Achieving true progress on sexual and reproductive health and rights requires a comprehensive approach and a commitment to tackling deeply entrenched inequities and injustices of which marginalized communities continue to bear the brunt,” said Dr. Herminia Palacio, President and CEO of the Guttmacher Institute. She spoke at a recent Wilson Center event where speakers analyzed findings from the Guttmacher Institute on the state of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) globally.