Daily Times

After an unprecedented series of floods, Pakistan has become the poster child for the monstrous challenges posed by climate change. Amid rising public debt and a global energy crisis that has devastated millions, the country does not have the means to adapt to its climate emergency on its own. Emotions ran high at the COP27 climate summit where a desperate Pakistan appealed to the international community for increased financial assistance, insisting that lost and damaged facilities were the key to solving Pakistan’s problems. For the first time in COP history, loss and damage were added to the official agenda, a move that has been resisted by the developed world many times before.

For disaster-prone countries like Pakistan, climate change is quickly becoming a matter of life and death; despite contributing almost nothing to global carbon emissions, we continue to bear the brunt of the Global North’s irresponsible industrialization. According to Post-Disaster Needs Assessment, Pakistan has suffered damages estimating $32 billion, which makes up approximately 10% of the country’s total GDP. Even if Pakistan becomes exponentially more active in its climate diplomacy efforts, it is trapped in a race against time that will be lost until the global north dedicates itself to the country’s survival. The slow pace of global climate diplomacy is ultimately incompatible with the remarkably fast rate of climate change. If the international community wants to make serious progress in combatting climate-related disasters, it must prepare itself for having blunt conversations that are more oriented towards climate science.

The G77, a coalition of 134 developing countries that have spearheaded the loss and damage agenda have called for the creation of a formal body that is able to compensate poor countries for damages incurred at the hands of the developed world. The United States and European Union have resisted this in the past, offering “technical assistance” instead which does little to further the post-disaster rehabilitation process. In order to achieve climate justice, the G20 must combine its collective resources to create a debt-relief framework that can ease the burden of climate change for middle-income countries, outside the normal aid channels of the World Bank. Diplomacy has been known to fail before and for countries like Pakistan, time is quickly running out; the Global North must confront the implications of its actions before it is too late. *