Last August, a single hour of heavy rain fell on Buner, a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In that one hour, the area got almost 15 percent of the rain it normally gets in a whole year. Water and rocks came rushing down the mountains into villages below. People had almost no time to run. By the time it was over, more than 500 people were dead.Pakistan did not cause that storm. In fact, Pakistan barely adds anything to the pollution that is warming our planet. And yet, almost every year, it is Pakistan’s villages that flood, Pakistan’s crops that fail, and Pakistan’s people who die in heatwaves and floods. This is the strange and unfair truth about climate change in Pakistan today — a country that did very little to create the problem is now living through some of its worst effects.How Much Does Pakistan Actually Pollute?According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Pakistan produces only about 1 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases — the gases that trap heat and cause global warming. Some other research groups put the number even lower, closer to 0.8 percent. On a per-person basis, the average Pakistani produces far less carbon pollution than the average person living in the United States, Europe, or China. In fact, the global average person produces about three times more carbon than the average Pakistani.In comparison, just six places in the world — China, the United States, India, the European Union, Russia, and Indonesia — are responsible for more than 60 percent of all the greenhouse gases produced on Earth. These same six also use most of the world’s energy and make up most of its economy. This is exactly the argument Pakistan has been making at big climate meetings like COP for years: a country that causes so little of the problem should not have to suffer the most because of it.But Pakistan Suffers the MostSadly, causing less pollution has not protected Pakistan from harm — if anything, the opposite seems true. On the ND-GAIN Index, a well-known ranking made by the University of Notre Dame that measures how much danger a country faces from climate change, Pakistan sits at number 146 out of all the countries studied. That makes it one of the most at-risk nations on Earth. A 2025 study funded by the German government went even further, saying Pakistan may be the single most vulnerable country to climate change in the entire world, ahead of every other nation studied.The United Nations’ own disaster relief agency, OCHA, agrees with this assessment. In its 2026 report on Pakistan’s monsoon season, it directly called Pakistan “the epicenter of climate change” and placed it among the top ten countries most at risk from floods, glacier lake bursts, droughts, and heatwaves.Even a ranking that sounds positive tells the same sad story underneath. Pakistan is ranked 15th out of many countries on the Climate Change Performance Index for 2026, which sounds like good news. But experts who study the index say this good ranking is mainly because Pakistan is a poorer country that uses very little energy overall — not because its government has especially strong climate policies. In fact, the same report says Pakistan’s use of clean, renewable energy like solar and wind power is still very low, and that its energy grid has serious problems getting electricity to where it’s needed.A Painful Year: 2025 and 2026The last year and a half have shown just how real this danger has become. Heavy monsoon rains between July and September 2025 caused widespread floods across the country. The total rainfall was 23 percent higher than what is considered normal. According to Pakistan’s own Economic Survey report, these floods caused losses of about Rs 822 billion, killed more than 1,037 people, injured over a thousand more, and forced over 4 million people to leave their homes. The damage was so serious that the government had to lower its economic growth target for the entire year, from 4.2 percent down to somewhere between 3.5 and 3.9 percent.A detailed study by the World Bank looked closely at the flash floods that hit Buner, Shangla, and Swat districts that same August. Researchers surveyed more than 1,200 families and found that 85 percent of them received no warning at all before the flood hit their homes. Of the families that did get some warning, half of them had less than thirty minutes to grab their things and run. In one village, the only warning system that actually worked was a local mosque’s loudspeaker, switched on after the imam received a phone call from a relative living further up the valley.“It was normal raining with no signs of the disaster it would cause. The cloudburst did not give us time to plan.”— A district official in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, describing the August 2025 flash floodsThe extreme heat has been just as dangerous as the floods. Pakistan’s Economic Survey says 2025 was the country’s second-hottest year in the last 65 years, with average temperatures reaching 23.9°C across the country. This heat did not stop when the year changed — it carried straight into 2026. In May, Karachi recorded its hottest day since 2018, with temperatures above 44°C, and at least ten people died from heat-related illness in Sindh within just a few days. By July, the city of Dadu recorded a shocking new........

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