by Ayesha RAFIQ
Pakistan’s renewed call for expanded global climate financing is not simply a policy statement. It is the voice of a nation shaped by catastrophe, resilience, and a deeply unfair climate reality. When Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal urged developed nations and international financial institutions to help developing countries adopt green technologies at lower cost, he spoke from the experience of a country that has endured a scale of climate destruction unmatched by its contribution to global emissions. Pakistan is responsible for less than 0.8 percent of global greenhouse gases, yet it remains among the top eight most climate vulnerable countries in the world. This imbalance, painful and undeniable, forms the core of Pakistan’s argument: those who caused the crisis must help those suffering its most brutal consequences.
The statistics behind Pakistan’s climate suffering are staggering. In 2022, the country experienced super floods that submerged one third of its land, an area larger than the size of the United Kingdom. More than 33 million people were affected, millions displaced, and economic losses exceeded 30 billion dollars. Entire villages were erased, 2 million homes washed away, and 4.4 million acres of crops destroyed. In the years since, climate shocks have escalated rather than eased. Record breaking heatwaves pushed temperatures in Jacobabad above 51 degrees Celsius, making it one of the hottest places on the planet. Glaciers in the northern regions have been melting at unprecedented rates, more than 23 percent faster across the last decade, triggering deadly glacial lake outburst floods. This year alone, more than 1,000 people lost their lives to floods and landslides intensified by warming temperatures and erratic rainfall patterns. Each statistic represents a human tragedy, a livelihood broken, a family uprooted.
For Pakistan, climate change is not an environmental challenge. It is a lived trauma that returns year after year. Farmers stand beside parched land where wheat and cotton should be growing. Mothers carry their children on their shoulders through waist deep floodwaters, praying the current does not drag them away. Entire communities, still rebuilding from previous disasters, watch helplessly as their newly reconstructed homes collapse under fresh waves of monsoon floods. Children lose not only their homes but their schools, their books, and months of education, creating a cycle of vulnerability that no country should be forced to endure. This emotional toll, immeasurable and generational, is the human face of the climate crisis.
Yet what makes this injustice even sharper is the global financial system’s failure to respond proportionately. The developed world has yet to meet its long standing commitment of 100 billion dollars per year in climate finance, a promise first announced in 2009 and still underdelivered more than a decade later. Meanwhile, developing countries now face a climate financing gap of more than 2.5 trillion dollars annually. Instead of receiving grants or low cost financing, nations like Pakistan are often pushed into borrowing at high interest rates simply to rebuild what climate change destroys. Pakistan already spends more than half of its development budget on climate resilience and post disaster reconstruction, an impossible burden for a country facing repeated, externally created climate shocks.
Despite these challenges, Pakistan remains determined to pursue a green, resilient future. The country is pushing forward with solar energy expansion, electric vehicle adoption, climate smart agriculture, and large scale reforestation. But ambition alone cannot overcome structural financial barriers. Without accessible, affordable, predictable climate financing, the vision of a resilient Pakistan remains trapped behind economic constraints it did not create.
This is why Minister Iqbal’s call for a redesigned global financial architecture is both timely and essential. He emphasized that the system must be rebuilt on the principles of collective responsibility and equity, principles that acknowledge that the countries suffering the worst climate impacts are not the ones who caused the crisis. Pakistan is not asking for sympathy. It is demanding justice, grounded in moral responsibility and climate accountability. A world that expects developing nations to adopt green technologies must also ensure that those technologies are financially attainable.
As climate disasters intensify from Europe to the Caribbean to the Pacific Islands, Pakistan’s warning to the world grows ever more urgent. Either the global community invests in resilience today, or it pays for irreversible loss tomorrow. Pakistan has shown courage in confronting the crisis, mobilizing its institutions, and advocating for vulnerable nations at global forums. What it seeks now from developed nations and financial institutions is not generosity, but fairness, a recognition that no nation should repeatedly pay with its people’s lives for a warming planet created by “Everyone”.
The message is clear, emotional, and anchored in reality. Climate justice is not optional. It is the only path to a stable, sustainable future. And the time for the world to act is not someday. It is now.
“The climate crisis is not a burden for the vulnerable to bear. It is a responsibility for the powerful to answer.”
