THE US-Israeli war on Iran is accelerating crises that combine climate-driven shocks and military destruction. It is reshaping how governments frame climate resilience and national security. It has fundamentally changed the global climate debate, moving it from a discussion of long-term transition to one of immediate survival and energy, water, food and ecosystem security.

For Pakistan, situated as it is at the crossroads of energy-import dependence, water stress, food insecurity and shifting trade routes, the supply shocks arising from the conflict are redefining what it means to be a climate-insecure state. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have blurred the lines between the environment and the battlefield.

The conflict triggered the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market, effectively shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, a corridor that carries 20 per cent of global LNG and a quarter of seaborne oil. This shock has pushed many countries into a ‘relapse’ towards fossil fuels as soaring prices force governments to prioritise short-term affordability over long-term climate commitments.

For Pakistan, an energy-importing country, the war has simultaneously made the argument for energy sovereignty through renewables impossible to ignore. With spiking oil and gas prices, solar and wind — paired with storage — have emerged as the only economically rational strategies for macroeconomic stability.

The direct ecological cost of the Gulf conflict is immediate and enduring.

Pakistan’s massive, people-led solar boom nee­ds further support. It was driven by the necessity of avoiding costly LNG and persistent load-shedding. This surge, which saved us up to $12 billion in avoided energy imports, proves that effective climate action can stem from deliberate domestic policy choices, including cutting subsidies and maintaining low import duties rather than total reliance on international finance. Pakistan must formalise this boom into a ‘national distributed energy reserve’, treating decentralised mini-grids not as a threat but as a strategic, resilient layer of the energy-security architecture.

A similarly alarming development is the weaponisation of water infrastructure. The Gulf region supplies roughly 40pc of the world’s desalinated water, and recent strikes on facilities in Iran and Bahrain demonstrate how climate-stressed areas can be pushed towards a militarised Day Zero. A hypothetical climate-risk scenario is now a tangible threat, reshaping discussions on transboundary water management and shifting attention towards the physical protection of water infrastructures. For Pakistan, the best insurance against such vulnerability is to move away from sole reliance on large, targetable dams and, instead, prioritise in the short term an elaborate web of groundwater recharging and decentralised wetlands and reservoirs. This distributed water model mirrors the solar revolution, creating a landscape that is far harder to disable through conventional or hybrid warfare.

The convergence of climate and security shocks has also exposed the brittleness of Pakistan’s buffers for essential goods. Relying on a ‘just-in-time’ supply practice for wheat, cooking oil and medicines is no longer viable in a conflict-prone world. Pakistan needs to adopt a ‘buffer doctrine’ that treats critical item reserves as a permanent layer of the national security infrastructure. By maintaining three to nine months of consumption stocks for staples and essential pharmaceutical in­­gredients, the state can smoothen price spikes during floods or trade shocks, embargoes, blockades and disruptions. These reserves are not me­­r­ely social welfare; they are climate-proofed insurance that stabilises the social balance sheet when supply chains fracture. The new strategic stability playbook is about well-managed food, petroleum and medicine reserves to prevent price sho­cks that lead to unrest and political instability.

The direct ecological cost of the conflict is immediate and enduring. Military operations generate a massive emissions gap that current national commitments fail to capture. Beyond the jets, we must account for the emissions of reconstruction. Rebuilding destroyed urban centres or damaged ports and refineries requires millions of tons of steel and cement, some of the most carbon-intensive industries. Simultaneously, reports of black rain and localised chemical pollution point to long-term soil degradation and public health risks. These toxic impacts will hinder regional climate-adaptation efforts for decades, marking a shift in discourse from climate as an environmental goal to a national security prerequisite.

The question of whether this dynamic helps meet global climate targets is a double-edged sword. On the positive side, when countries treat renewables as a security hedge, they build them far faster than they would for purely environmental reasons; national security budgets move more quickly than environmental ones.

Finally, climate finance is increasingly being cannibalised by rising defence costs. If global ca­­pital continues to be redirected toward missiles and fortifying infrastructure, the $5.6 trillion re­­q­­uired annually for the clean-energy transition will remain unattainable for the Global South, thus creating a cycle in which security-focused spe­­n­d­ing benefits wealthier nations while leaving vu­­l­n­erable populations exposed to further instability.

Pakistan should, therefore, leverage its strategic position to build new partnerships, solidifying transboundary green-energy corridors and deepening technical cooperation on desalination and drought-resilient agriculture. Using climate-proo­fed economic infrastructure to secure its long-term political and economic future is a strategically important path in a world where the environment and the battlefield are now one and the same.

The financing of a resilient architecture cannot wait for the already broken promises of international climate finance. Instead, Pakistan must trigger its Public Sector Development Programme for a rigorous security-climate audit. This means diverting the necessary funds from the budgeted PSDP total of Rs1 trillion from traditional infrastructure towards decentralised resilient, low-carbon survival assets.

The PSDP can leverage domestic policy instruments such as sovereign guarantees for private-sector strategic storage of grains, water, petroleum products and energy-efficient manufacturing, allowing Pakistan to build this entire resilience framework within a five-year window. The goal is to treat the PSDP as a primary engine for national transformation.

The biggest lesson of the solar revolution is that it was achieved through a mix of policy instruments: cutting inefficient subsidies under IMF-linked reforms and reducing import duties on solar equipment. It shows that not all climate action depends on international finance, but on deliberate policy choices by the government.

The writer is a climate change and sustainable development expert.

Published in Dawn, March 26th, 2026

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