Federal Minister for Climate Change Dr Musadik Malik on Tuesday urged Parliament to enact effective legislation to improve migration governance, stressing the need to make the migration process safe, orderly and transparent amid growing displacement caused by climate-related disasters.
Addressing a seminar on the role of Parliament in improving migration and migration governance, the minister said Pakistan needed an effective legislative framework to respond to the emerging challenges associated with large-scale displacement.
He said climate-induced disasters had forced around 40 million people to relocate during the past five floods, while about 7,000 people had lost their lives and nearly 17,000 had been injured or permanently disabled.
Dr Malik said the figures reflected the enormous human cost of climate-related disasters and highlighted the need for a comprehensive approach to migration governance. He said the issue should not be viewed merely through statistics, as displacement involved the loss of homes, livelihoods, schools and communities.
Referring to the experiences of families affected by floods, he said children, parents and entire communities had been uprooted, while schools and places of worship had also been washed away.
“When you take each of those as a story and give it a human face, you start to see what displacement means for a person,” he said.
The minister said migration governance needed to be strengthened through effective legislation, with Parliament having an important role in developing the required legal framework. He stressed that migration should be managed in a manner that protected people affected by displacement and ensured that the process remained safe, orderly and transparent.
Dr Malik said his remarks were focused primarily on climate-induced migration in view of his current responsibilities, although migration and displacement could also be examined from security, economic and other perspectives.
He said repeated floods had demonstrated the scale at which climate-related disasters could disrupt human lives and force people to leave their homes.
The minister emphasised that the growing scale of displacement required policymakers and legislators to give greater attention to migration governance and develop mechanisms capable of responding to the needs of affected populations.
He said Parliament’s role was particularly important in providing the legislative basis for a coordinated and transparent migration governance system.
