Sustainable Industrial Development in Punjab, Pakistan
Greening Pakistan’s industry has become an imperative to minimize its adverse impacts on the environment and society, but also to sustain the sector’s growth. Despite substantial growth in recent decades, the industrial sector is yet to make its fu...
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| Format: | Report |
| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2019
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/290561563186401579/Sustainable-Industrial-Development-in-Punjab-Pakistan http://hdl.handle.net/10986/32119 |
| Summary: | Greening Pakistan’s industry has become
an imperative to minimize its adverse impacts on the
environment and society, but also to sustain the sector’s
growth. Despite substantial growth in recent decades, the
industrial sector is yet to make its full contribution to
Pakistan’s development. Limited consideration of the growing
resource use, waste, and pollution that have accompanied
industrialization has imposed mounting economic,
environmental, and social costs. This is particularly true
in large urban centers around which industries agglomerate,
such as Lahore and Karachi. At the same time, poor
environmental management has become a liability for
Pakistan’s industries, which notably undermines the
competitiveness of export-oriented manufacturing sectors.
The challenges posed by industries’ lack of environmental
sustainability jeopardize Pakistan’s development and are
expected to worsen under a business-as-usual scenario. The
Government of Punjab (GoPunjab) should put sustainable
industrialization at the center of its growth strategy and
should modernize its policy toolkit for this purpose.
Punjab’s Growth Strategy 2018 envisioned that growth must be
private sector-led, investment-driven, export-oriented,
environmentally sound, and employment-intensive. Developing
an ambitious and integrated policy to green industries would
be a strategic way to jointly achieve these objectives, and
in so doing, Punjab could become a lighthouse for the rest
of Pakistan. This would require both strengthening
environmental policy (stick) and developing elements of a
green industrial policy looking at investment, innovation,
and trade (carrot). Importantly, policy objectives should go
beyond the current focus on pollution control and
compliance, to include preventive and circular approaches at
the firm and industry levels that could yield environmental
and productivity/competitiveness gains. The time has come to
integrate these approaches in strategies and regulations,
and to institutionalize and mainstream them across relevant
government agencies. |
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