LAST month, at the London School of Economics’ Environment Week, the International Growth Centre asked a roundtable of policymakers, researchers and funders how evidence systems should change to support harder climate choices. I opened with a case: a major climate decision Pakistan took without the evidence it needed.

The obvious case is the 2022 floods. The obvious diagnosis is that the evidence did not exist. The case is obviously right. The diagnosis is obviously wrong.

When a third of the country went under water, every decision that followed, from evacuation to the Geneva appeal, was taken in the dark. Yet the Met department had forecast an above-normal monsoon. The national socio-economic registry held geo-coded records on 38 million households. River and satellite data sat with Wapda, the Federal Flood Commission and Suparco. The knowledge existed, in different buildings. No one was mandated to bring it to the table.

Pakistan does not have a data shortage. The usual verdict is poor coordination. That is the wrong word. Coordination is voluntary. What Pakistan lacks is a chain of custody: someone legally obliged to carry evidence to the point of decision.

The five federal agencies that hold hazard data share no protocol.

The roundtable framed three tensions: whether evidence serves the decisions governments actually take, whether it arrives in time to be used, and whether it supports implementation or only design. In Pakistan, each tension marks a break in that chain. Each break has a price tag.

Evidence and decision: Pakistan’s research agenda follows........

© Dawn