In 2022, floods submerged a third of Pakistan. Over 1,700 people died, 33 million were affected, and the damage was estimated at more than $30 billion, a figure larger than the country’s entire annual development budget. Three years on, Pakistan still has no formal climate emergency declaration, no single legal instrument that unlocks binding planning powers, dedicated emergency funding, or a coordinated national response mechanism specifically triggered by climate risk.

I’ve spent years in the rooms where Pakistan’s exposure gets discussed with real seriousness, COP negotiations, World Bank briefings, World Economic Forum panels. The country is consistently named among the handful most vulnerable to climate change anywhere in the world, and rightly so: a population heavily dependent on the Indus River system, glacial melt accelerating in the north, monsoon patterns growing more erratic and destructive, and agricultural livelihoods for tens of millions of people sitting directly in the path of it. And yet the gap between how urgently this gets treated internationally and what actually exists domestically to match it has never closed.

The international community treats this reality as a settled fact every time Pakistan’s delegation takes a seat at COP.

The international community treats this reality as a settled fact every time Pakistan’s delegation takes a seat at COP.

A formal climate emergency declaration is not a symbolic gesture. In the countries that have made one, it typically........

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