ON every World Environment Day (June 5), nations pause to acknowledge a crisis that has been in the making for over half a century. For Pakistan, a country where floods and droughts occur in a single year, where glaciers and farms are stressed, it should be an unsettling moment. The day should not be seen as a single 24-hour celebration but a serious summons to face the slow-motion emergency we are manufacturing.

The international recognition that began with the 1972 Environmental Stockholm Conference has not been able to contain manmade environmental degradation. Two decades later, the Earth Summit in 1992 reframed that realisation into the broader concept of sustainable development, embedding environmental concerns within economic and social systems. Then came the 2015 Paris Agreement, a landmark global consensus to limit warming and avert the worst of climate change.

The world has negotiated more than 250 multilateral environmental agreements — an architecture that, on paper, reflects unprecedented cooperation. In reality, it reveals a troubling paradox: the proliferation of agreements has not translated into environmental recovery. Pakistan is party to roughly 15 multilateral agreements, but the state of the environment is........

© Dawn