Search for Peace and Regional Stability!
November 10, 2025
Zainab Tanveer
In the politics of the climate crisis, vulnerability is not distributed evenly across the globe. Pakistan, a state that contributes less than one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, has emerged as one of the most climate-vulnerable in the world. This paradox lies at the core of what Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Climate Change, Dr. Musadik Malik, has called a “crisis of justice.”
In June 2025, as yet another season of unprecedented floods has devastated vast swathes of the country, Malik pointed to the structural imbalance incorporated in global climate responsibility, meaning while the United States and China collectively account for nearly 45% of global emissions, Pakistan receives only a fraction of the international green financing to calibrate its escalating climate upheavals.
Pakistan’s plight is not merely an environmental concern but rather an emblem of deeper rhythms of global equity, governance, bias, and deliberate isolation in climate policies. The country’s repeated experiences of floods, glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs), and prolonged droughts are encapsulated by the uneven geography of climate change, where developing states in the Global South bear the heaviest burdens of a crisis they had little initiation of.
As David Wallace-Wells observes in The Uninhabitable Earth, warming is not felt uniformly across the globe but brutalizes the tropics disproportionately, where small temperature changes become tributaries to existential threats for agriculture, water security, and human survival. In this sense, Pakistan is not only a victim of nature’s volatility but also a case study on how global politics have failed to equitably mitigate the effects of climate change and how excessive solitude over fundamental issues like this increases vulnerability.
Pakistan is a Sub-tropical state of the Global South whose developing status draws on the climate science mitigation and exemplifies an international climate vulnerability paradox, resonated by Mark Lynas, in Six Degrees, as how every additional layer of warming slowly molests the equatorial and tropical states through famine, floods, drought, and displacements. This deprecates already degraded natural resources dependent on increasingly inadequate institutions and vice versa.
Pakistan is an agricultural state, making water management a vital tool for efficient irrigation. However, drastically lower water storage capacity per person cripples effective conservation when flooding brings large volumes of water. The irrigation system’s efficiency is less than 40% which accounts for the loss of 61% of water.
Institutionally, the lack of a regulatory framework for groundwater allows for indiscriminate pumping, leading to alarming rates of groundwater depletion, amplifying resource fragility. This feedback loop of ecological and political entrapment is theorized in Homer-Dixon’s Environmental Scarcity Theory as a debilitating cycle where scarcity weakens institutions, a weak institution’s failure to address scarcity leads to more insecurity.
Moreover, Pakistan is home to 7200 glaciers, which make it prone to glacial outburst floods, which were also the prime catalysts to the 2022 floods that led the country into an economic loss of $30 billion. Robust infrastructure and climate-adaptive canals and waterways need to be duly constructed to sustain the climatic nature of these disasters.
A striking asymmetry defines the global carbon economy and its emissions: the United States and China together account for nearly 45% of global emissions, while Pakistan’s contribution remains below 1%. This disparity is not merely statistical but a tale of structural subservience and climate solitude.
States in the Global North, with higher per capita incomes and more robust fiscal systems, possess far greater potency in the face of climate shocks, reinforcing an international realist appraisal in which wealthier nations are better able to externalize risk, while poorer states such as Pakistan face escalating vulnerabilities without equilibrating response capacity.
This structural realist imbalance has been tried to be mitigated through a rather liberalist framework of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) principle under the UNFCCC. Adopted in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit, it aims to explain the notion of climate disparity, where all the states would share the same brunt of a deteriorating ecosystem but vary in responsibilities due to their historical contribution to climate change, amplified by their capacity to perpetuate it as well. This principle aims to re-vitalize climate policy insinuations through legal grounding, prioritizing the need for solidarity and common action, addressing persistent under-funding of adaptation in the global south.
Pakistan shouldering climate injustice, therefore becomes a holistic case study exemplifying the need to push legal frameworks within itself as a country, as well as within IPE that aim to re-equilibrate the burden vs benefits equation, through legal insinuations and a recalibrated approach to policy outcomes.
The global order aims to chip away the bargaining power of those that are fundamentally weak, this is devised through their overall national power caliber, which then directly inhibits their say under a multilateral fora, illustrated through the dynamics of realist theories. In other words, power projection dictates a state’s dominance as well as the responding capacity of international institutions.
Although this very much has been the structural reality in global politics, this has been morally questioned by institutions aiming to bring countries from all over the world to a consensus bound through mutual interest, as Hedley Bull observed in the anarchical society that it rests upon the common interest of states, acknowledging that restraint and cooperation sometimes is in the best interest.
This cooperation embodies in international forums like UNFCCC, that aims for collaborative approaches involving nations and other stakeholders to help develop strategies for mutual input into climate action, the World Bank, which uses knowledge and capacity building initiatives to foster climate change mitigation and the IPCC which works on the auspices of the UN and World Metrological Organization aiming to collectively provide policy-makers with informed climate related decision through scientific assessments.
Although climate-led liberalist institutionalism exists, its lack of reinforcement still is a stringent issue to ponder, as countries such as Pakistan still face the brunt of the isolation climate crisis (the recent being the 2025 floods) but lack any sort of foreign climate finance provisions or collaborative actions for better institutional or infrastructural adaptation.
To address the issues of environmental insecurity in Pakistan, existing projects and gaps within them need to be analyzed. Addressing the challenges for a holistic theoretical policy framework is vital for a solitary political responsiveness.
Pakistan first needs to recognize its agency and untangle problems from within. This not only includes making new projects but re-vamping existing ones as well, such as building climate-related domestic policies. Donor and banks do finance certain resilience projects but Pakistan needs to expand it’s project scope and nationalize it, such as prioritizing multi-hazard early warning systems such as automated weather stations or community alert chains and multi-hazard resilient housing, roads and maintenance funds so infrastructures survive any climate hazard instead of going through a costly repair process.
Moreover, nationally standardizing river and meteorological sensors, framing appropriate contingency maintenance budgets, all help reduce loss and accelerate recovery. However, they need to be mainstreamed across provinces chronologically in accordance with flood probability.
Pakistan needs to reform disaster governance through unified planning, decentralizing response, and funding necessary anticipatory action. Considering that its response capacity remains disproportionate across federal, provincial, and district levels, Pakistan’s institutional reforms should focus on a more legalized DRR national framework that mitigates roles and finance, devolves contingency funds to districts, and institutionalizes anticipatory actions such as preemptive cash or evacuation linking to forecasts.
National Disaster Management Authority’s 2025-2030 strategy prioritizes these stringent and much-needed actions while also linking humanitarian agencies to national forecasting centers with improved coordination.
Agriculture makes up 20% of Pakistan’s GDP; therefore, its resilience through crop diversification, credit, and index insurance should be a top priority. Simple but effective investments such as drought-tolerant seeds, improved extension services, climate-smart irrigation, and objective indices induced crop insurance, cushioning the economic downturn of harvest failure.
Moreover, subsidizing climate-smart inputs for vulnerable or flood-prone districts and supporting local seed banks helps externalize adaptation at the farm level while subsequently reducing humanitarian needs and preserving national food security.
While still reeling from devastating 2022 floods that submerged one-third of the country, Pakistan, the then chair of G77+ China, called out the existing climate finance mechanism for being too donor-oriented and failing to provide accessible support to climate-vulnerable nations.
It demanded a paradigm shift to climate governance, calling for it to be more responsive, equitable to the needs of vulnerable states. This led to a breakthrough agreement in COP27: the creation of a loss and damage fund, meaning a new funding arrangement beyond loans, direct access for vulnerable countries, and representation of global south voices in decision-making boards.
In subsequent UNFCCC and IMF-World Bank discussions in 2023-24, Pakistan, on behalf of its southern bloc, had reiterated the same agenda that MDBs and IFIs must reform their respective lending practices, where the concessional climate finance often came as loans, exacerbating debt burdens.
Pakistan also pushed for climate finance to be counted separately from the existing ODA (Official Development Assistance), since most of the donor countries counted aid as climate finance. These events, therefore, exemplified Pakistan’s diplomatic efforts to turn its climate vulnerability into a collective political assertiveness.
Ultimately, the climate crisis of the global south is a political crisis of a global system that consistently has prioritized power over justice and provisions solitude over solidarity. Pakistan’s climate vulnerability must be understood as a political consequence as much as an environmental one, for it illustrates how historical dependency on the Indus Basin, the excessive retreat of Himalayan glaciers, the sensitivities of its agricultural economy, and most importantly, structural isolation intertwine with global governance failures and gaps in climate finance.
Situating Pakistan on the crossroads of climate justice and international political economy reveals that the country’s recurring deluges are consequently symptomatic not simply of an isolated episode of ecological breakdown, but of a global order that transfers risk onto the poorest and least powerful, who are thus being systematically ostracized from climate equity and financial repartitions.
The author is currently studying Strategic and Nuclear studies. Her academic interests span both traditional and non-traditional security domains, including nuclear deterrence, modern conflict escalation dynamics, human security, and environmental security. In addition to her focus on strategic affairs, she also explores contemporary cultural and societal trends, often analyzing how they intersect with global political developments. She is passionate about writing research-driven narratives that connect theory with real-world complexities.
