Climate change in Pakistan is no longer a forecast; it is a lived disaster. From the 2022 floods that displaced millions and caused an estimated $30 billion in damages to the 2025 heatwaves and monsoon cloudbursts, our country has become a laboratory of climate vulnerability.
Climate change has also become a political battlefield shaped by narratives of populism, trust, and blame. In Pakistan, left- or right-wing populist leaders deploy it as a discourse of victimhood, justice, or fate. Recent scholarship and political debate suggest that how citizens interpret and respond to climate change is deeply entangled with populist worldviews.
A 2022 study by Robert Huber and colleagues found that populist citizens in the Global North often distrust institutions and science, sometimes leading to climate-change denial. Pakistan’s populism takes a different form. Here, leaders rarely deny climate change; instead, they acknowledge it but frame it in ways that absolve the public of responsibility.
By removing humans from the sentence, language presents ecological collapse as a natural process rather than the direct result of human action.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has argued at COP summits that Pakistan is an innocent victim of the Global North’s emissions, while senior officials including the Federal Minister for Climate Change, Dr. Musadik Masood Malik, have called the floods a “crisis of justice.” They are right to highlight global inequity, but such language can cast Pakistanis as passive sufferers rather than as actors with agency in environmental degradation.
Former Climate Minister Sherry Rehman, however, has gone further by linking climate devastation to domestic mismanagement – deforestation, unchecked housing projects, and illegal constructions on riverplains. Yet even these failures are too often presented solely as the fault of corrupt elites rather than as the outcome of broader societal neglect. The ongoing flooding of the River Ravi in Park View Society is a striking example of this neglect.
Maryam Nawaz Sharif, Chief Minister of Punjab, has at times attributed natural disasters to divine will, underscoring that “life and death are in the hands of Allah Almighty.” Such words may comfort, but they can also deflect responsibility from human actions – burning forests, polluting rivers, overbuilding in floodplains – onto fate.
What is missing from these discourses is a direct acknowledgment of anthropocentrism: the worldview that places human needs at the center, treating nature as backdrop or resource. This mindset is deeply embedded in our linguistic habits and, ultimately, in our actions.
In our research, Exploring the Role of First Language in Ecological Awareness and Communication across Pakistan, published in Language Sciences Journal, we examined how speakers of Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Balochi, and Balti describe environmental crises. Across languages, people often use passive or ergative structures that erase human agency. Instead of “people cut down forests,” they say “the forests are being destroyed.” Instead of “factories emit carbon dioxide,” they say “carbon dioxide is increasing.” By removing humans from the sentence, language presents ecological collapse as a natural process rather than the direct result of human action.
This is not a trivial matter of grammar. It reflects and reinforces a worldview in which humans see themselves as separate from – and not accountable to – the climate. When forests are “being destroyed” on their own, we do not see loggers with axes. When smog “appears” in Lahore, we do not see factories or motor vehicles. When green pastures and agricultural fields are seized by land mafias, we do not see sustainable housing development but unregulated land grabbing.
Anthropocentric language, paradoxically, hides humans. It lets us treat ecological disasters as inevitable rather than human-made, as external misfortunes rather than consequences of our extractive relationship with nature.
The ecological damage this worldview has enabled is everywhere. Pakistan’s forests, once a buffer against floods, have been cut down by the timber mafia and commercialization. Our rivers, once considered lifelines, are now lined with hotels, housing societies, and apartment complexes. They ultimately carry untreated sewage and industrial waste, sustaining hardly any aquatic life.
Our cities continue to expand with little regard for ecological planning, choking each winter under smog, facing acute shortages of groundwater, and struggling to provide safe drinking water. These are not divine acts or foreign conspiracies; instead, they are direct results of our policies and practices that treat the ecosystem as disposable.
Anthropocentrism has brought us to the brink; only ecosolidarity can bring us back. If our leaders want to turn words into action, they must first change the language of our homes.
Our study found that Pakistan’s major languages – Balochi, Balti, Pashto, Punjabi, and Sindhi – contain rich metaphors and expressions that can reframe the climate crisis. By naming ecological problems in their own tongues, communities are more likely to recognize their role and responsibility. This is the foundation of what we call ecosolidarity: a collective awareness that humans and non-humans are interdependent, and that preserving biodiversity is preserving life itself.
For Pakistan, this means moving beyond narratives of helplessness. Yes, the Global North must honour its climate-finance commitments. But our leaders must also stop speaking of climate change solely in terms of injustice, fate, or natural disaster. They must recognize the anthropocentric mindset encoded in our discourse and shift toward language that restores human agency.
Instead of “forests are being destroyed,” we must say “we are cutting down the forests.” Instead of “smog appears,” we must say “our factories and motor vehicles pollute the air.” By naming ourselves as the cause, we also name ourselves as the solution.
Language is not just a medium of communication; it is a medium of thought, responsibility, and possibility. There are only two options: either we are with nature or against it. How ironic it is to blame nature for a natural disaster.
The first author is a Professor of English at Riphah International University, Lahore. He is a lead guest editor at Emerald and Springer publishing.
The second author is an Assistant Professor of English at Govt. Graduate College for Women, Samanabad, Lahore