The 80th United Nations General Assembly convenes this month under the theme "Better together: 80 years and more for peace, development and human rights". For Pakistan, the session offers not just another forum for speeches, but a crucial stage to demand justice on behalf of climate-vulnerable nations.

Each word of the UNGA theme — peace, development, human rights — rings hollow when measured against the reality of climate injustice. There can be no peace when communities are repeatedly displaced by floods, no development when agriculture collapses, and no human rights when people are stripped of homes and livelihoods by a crisis they did not create.

The delegation Pakistan sends to New York must put climate change at the heart of its diplomacy. This is not a matter of prestige but of survival. With less than one per cent contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions, Pakistan has become one of the top ten most climate-vulnerable states (Germanwatch Global Climate Risk Index, 2021). The injustice is clear: those who polluted least are paying the highest price.

Scientists confirm that monsoon patterns in South Asia are being intensified by climate change (IPCC AR6, 2021), a trend that raises fears of many more disasters in the future.

Pakistan's recent ordeal makes this injustice tangible. Since late June 2025, heavier-than-normal monsoon rains and cloudburst floods have claimed over 1,000 lives, inundated farmland and disrupted livelihoods. The catastrophe displaced 33 million people, destroyed 2 million homes, damaged 4.4 million acres of crops and inflicted $30 billion in economic losses. The scars of earlier floods........

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