When Pakistan’s Climate Minister Mussadiq Malik recently called the deadly floods “a crisis of justice,” he struck a chord with many in the Global South. The language of injustice has become central to climate diplomacy — and for good reason. Countries like Pakistan, which have contributed almost nothing to global carbon emissions, keep bearing the brunt of climate disasters. They are being drowned by emissions they didn’t produce, pushed to the margins of global finance, and called upon to clean up after a mess made elsewhere.

But in the rush to call out historical polluters — rightly, and with evidence — the government has also found a convenient way to paper over its own role in Pakistan’s vulnerability. When the state speaks up for justice in international forums, it often skirts around the deeper, internal crisis of justice that has played out across Pakistan’s rivers, fields, and floodplains for decades. In doing so, it misses the opportunity to turn climate catastrophe into structural course correction.

Successive governments have leaned heavily into the rhetoric of external blame while turning away from difficult questions about domestic reform. They speak passionately of climate reparations but fall back on the very development model that has pushed Pakistan into ecological and social precarity. They seek out global sympathy and funding but hold off on addressing entrenched patterns of environmental mismanagement that have built up over time.

Pakistan’s water and agricultural systems offer the clearest example.........

© The Friday Times