Impact of Climate Change on Human Development: Resilience as a Strategy for Adaptation

Abstract

Climate change is a complex phenomenon that restricts human development directly and indirectly. It is ironical for sustainability of a country, which rank 135th in per capita emission of greenhouse gases globally, but rank fifth on climate change vulnerability. Numerous dimensions of the sustainable development are influenced by the threat of climate change. It has widespread impression across different sectors and ecosystem like water, food, forest, energy, and biodiversity; marine and coastal environment; similarly, intensity of climate hazard such as drought and floods impacts the human development. This study consists on overall objectives to evaluate the current and future potential influences of changing climate on human development in Punjab. This study is divided into two parts; in first slice we measure the impact of climate change on human development by applying Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model (ARDL) on the data collected from Global Data Lab for the period of 1990 to 2024. In second part we elaborate the resilience framework to describe the process and required resources at different levels of population groups that can prepare them to contend with the impacts of climate change. To illustrate the implication of framework we used examples of different interventions that focused on mobilization of powerful adaptive system to build social cohesions, hope, agency, and belonging sense.  Study concludes that climate variables have negative association with human development and we call development scientists to engage in research of resilience to address unprecedented and existential climate change threat. On the basis of our finding study suggest that government should emphasize the climate policies to enhance the human development in Punjab, Pakistan.