Pakistan’s climate emergency isn’t a seasonal headline anymore. It is a constant, erratic intrusion into everyday life. According to the provincial disaster management authority (PDMA), there is a risk of glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) events in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa due to rising temperatures and rains. A severe heatwave persists on the other end of the country, where Dadu broke a 10-year record on Friday as mercury hit 51.5°C.
Those two images – of ice melting too fast in the north and heat melting tarmac in the south – tell us more than any speech about how unprepared Pakistan is. Glacial lake outburst floods aren’t new, but warmer air and heavier spring rains make them more frequent and unpredictable. Similarly, extreme heat has always been part of summers in Pakistan, but 51.5°C is a number that turns work into a health hazard.
This is not a story about occasional disasters. It is the country’s daily exposure to a warmer world, sharpened by weak planning, poor enforcement and an old habit of waiting for disaster before the state becomes visible.
Yet the collective response still has the reflexes of a country waiting for the next donation. Officials talk of climate justice abroad. Nevertheless, public development plans at home still often ignore climate risk assessments and environmental impact, despite guidelines to incorporate them. The national climate plan lays out an ambitious vision: halve projected emissions by 2035, push renewable energy to 60 per cent and put 30 per cent of vehicles on electricity. The price tag is enormous – roughly US $566 billion by 2035, of which 82 per cent depends on grants and concessional finance. However, most of the work sits with provincial departments that have neither the budgets nor the expertise to enforce building codes, manage forests, or regulate groundwater.
No climate fund, foreign or domestic, will fill that gap if the state keeps treating climate as an afterthought. Pakistan’s finance minister recently said the country should first use its own fiscal space to fight climate change. He is right. But fiscal space is not found by cutting one ministry’s budget to build a wall in another district. In essence, it is created by rethinking how everything from roads and schools to agriculture and energy is planned.
There is also a geopolitical dimension that Pakistan cannot ignore. The World Meteorological Organisation’s latest five-year outlook projects that global mean temperatures from 2026-2030 will likely sit between 1.3°C and 1.9°C above pre-industrial levels, with at least one year almost certain to surpass 1.5°C. That means the weather Pakistan is seeing now is just a preview of what will occur next. It also means energy choices made in industrial capitals will determine how much harder Pakistan’s future becomes. Yet climate diplomacy will only be credible if Pakistan demonstrates it is not waiting for outsiders to fix what it can. *