Pakistan's Central Bank Receives $1.2 Billion From IMF For Climate Resilience
The amount was released after the International Monetary Fund's Executive Board completed the second review of the Extended Fund Facility and the first of the Resilience and Sustainability Facility.
Pakistan's central bank on Thursday announced that it has received $1.2 billion from the International Monetary Fund as part of the ongoing loans programmes aimed at building climate resilience in Pakistan.
The amount was released after the International Monetary Fund's Executive Board had completed the second review of the Extended Fund Facility and the first of the Resilience and Sustainability Facility (RSF), the State Bank of Pakistan said in a statement here.
The decision was taken during the board's meeting at Washington on Monday.
The amount, which would reflect in the bank's foreign exchange reserves for the week ending Dec. 12, is part of the IMF’s dual track bailout for Pakistan with a 37-month EFF and climate focussed RSF.
The IMF has, until now under this bail out package, disbursed $3.3 billion to Pakistan to support the stabilisation of the macroeconomics and long term financial structural reforms for climate resilience.
Cash-strapped Pakistan is currently in 24th IMF programme agreed last year to provide it $7 billion dollars over a period of 39 months.
As per the latest approval, Pakistan is allowed to draw $1 billion under EFF and $200 million under RSF.
According to a World Bank report of 2022, climate- and weather-related disasters, which have increasingly been exacerbated by climate change, resulted in $29.3 billion in economic losses over 1992-2021, equivalent to 11.1% of 2020 GDP, which slowed developmental gains in Pakistan.
More recently, the floods of 2022 killed 1,700 people, displaced 8 million, increased the poverty rate by up to 4 percentage points, and brought economic losses equivalent to 4.8% of Fiscal 2022 GDP, with reconstruction needs estimated at 1.6 times the budgeted national development expenditure of Fiscal 2023, the IMF said in a 2024 report.
