Drowning in Someone Else’s Emissions: Pakistan and the Broken Ledger of Global Climate Finance

By: Babar Akhtar : Published by ANI

Water has become the clearest measure of injustice in the modern world economy. Just two days ago, a glacier collapse on the Nepal-Tibet border sent a wall of ice and debris down the Trishuli Valley, killing hundreds and erasing entire settlements within minutes. Nepal’s tragedy made global headlines because of its violence and suddenness. But for Pakistan, such a headline is no longer a distant warning from a neighboring mountain range, it is increasingly a description of an emergency that returns almost every year. Consider the toll Pakistan has endured in recent years. In 2022, devastating monsoon floods submerged a third of the country, killed more than 1,700 people, and caused approximately $40 billion in damages and economic losses. In 2025, exceptionally heavy rains and flash floods again struck Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan, and Azad Kashmir, killing more than a thousand people and displacing millions. In 2026, the pattern has continued, with hundreds again losing their lives during the monsoon season. Yet Pakistan contributes less than one per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. This contradiction should be at the heart of every discussion about global climate finance: those who have contributed least to the problem are often paying the highest price for its consequences.
At COP27 in 2022, held in the immediate aftermath of Pakistan’s catastrophic floods, Pakistan played an important role in the diplomatic push that resulted in agreement to establish the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage. The decision was historic because it recognized that vulnerable developing countries suffer climate-related losses that cannot always be prevented through adaptation. Yet the resources mobilized remain tiny compared with the scale of the challenge. The world is increasingly willing to acknowledge climate injustice in principle, but far less willing to finance it at the scale required.
The problem is larger than the size of one fund. The real crisis is hidden in the accounting system of global climate finance. Money is announced in billions, but vulnerable countries often experience it in millions, after years of negotiations, project preparation, approvals, and conditions. The United Nations Environment Program’s 2025 Adaptation Gap Report estimates that developing countries will require between $310 billion and $365 billion annually by 2035 for climate adaptation, while international public adaptation finance stood at only $26 billion in 2023. The gap is therefore enormous. Pakistan’s own adaptation and climate transition needs also run into billions of dollars each year.
This is where the phrase “climate finance” needs to be stripped of its diplomatic ambiguity. A loan for a flood-resilient road is not equivalent to a grant for a community already devastated by floods. A commercial investment in a profitable solar project is not equivalent to financing the relocation of a village threatened by a collapsing glacier. Yet global climate accounting often places these different forms of finance under the same broad umbrella. That is the broken ledger. Every dollar labelled as climate finance should answer three questions: Who provided it? On what terms? And who ultimately bears the cost? This matters because debt can turn climate vulnerability into a second crisis. If a country borrows heavily to rebuild after every disaster, it can enter a vicious cycle: disaster destroys infrastructure, reconstruction increases borrowing, debt constrains public investment, weak infrastructure increases vulnerability, and the next disaster creates another borrowing requirement. Pakistan therefore needs a climate-finance strategy built around prevention rather than repeated reconstruction. Financing resilience before disasters occur is economically wiser than repeatedly borrowing to rebuild after them.
But adaptation alone will not be enough. Pakistan must also transform the sectors that determine its future emissions, competitiveness, and energy security. Industry is central to this transition. Pakistani manufacturers face an uncomfortable contradiction: global markets increasingly demand lower-carbon production, while domestic industries often lack affordable capital to modernize machinery, improve energy efficiency, adopt renewable energy, and reduce emissions. If climate finance does not reach the industrial sector, Pakistan risks facing a new form of inequality not merely climate vulnerability, but carbon competitiveness vulnerability. For Pakistani exporters, decarbonization is no longer simply an environmental obligation; it is becoming an economic survival strategy. This is where climate finance should change direction. Instead of focusing primarily on post-disaster reconstruction, international institutions should help Pakistani industries finance their transition before global markets make it unavoidable. Blended finance, concessional credit, green bonds, guarantees, climate-linked lending, and technology-transfer mechanisms can reduce the cost of capital and make industrial decarbonization commercially viable. Developing countries should not be forced to choose between development and decarbonization; they should be provided with the financial and technological means to achieve both.
Pakistan must also improve its own climate-finance governance. International partners can provide money, but the country must identify priorities, prepare bankable projects, measure outcomes, and demonstrate where every dollar goes. Climate finance cannot become another fragmented collection of donor-funded projects scattered across ministries and provinces. Pakistan needs a national climate-investment architecture connecting climate policy with fiscal, industrial, energy, and development planning. A transparent tracking mechanism should distinguish clearly between grants, concessional loans, commercial finance, and private investment. Pakistan should also become more assertive in international negotiations. It should not approach climate finance merely as a recipient asking for assistance, but as a vulnerable economy demanding a fairer financial relationship. The principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities is already embedded in international climate diplomacy. Those who have historically contributed more to the accumulation of greenhouse gases have a greater responsibility to support those facing the consequences with fewer resources. That principle should be reflected not only in speeches but also in balance sheets.
Pakistan’s demand should therefore be neither charity nor compensation without accountability. It should be climate justice expressed through finance. Climate-resilient irrigation protects agricultural output; energy efficient factories reduce production costs; renewable energy can reduce exposure to imported fuel prices; and resilient infrastructure protects supply chains. Climate investment is not an expense imposed on development. It is increasingly a condition for development itself. The tragedy of Pakistan’s climate story is that the country is being asked to pay twice: first through the physical damage caused by a warming planet, and again through the financial cost of protecting itself from that warming. That is why the global climate ledger must be rewritten. The world should stop judging climate finance by the size of pledges announced at international conferences and start judging it by the resilience created in vulnerable economies by lives protected, infrastructure secured, debt avoided, emissions reduced, and livelihoods made more resilient.
Pakistan cannot control how much carbon has already accumulated in the atmosphere. But it can determine whether the next generation inherits a resilient economy or a permanently indebted one struggling to rebuild after every disaster. The international community has a choice: continue treating Pakistan’s floods as humanitarian emergencies requiring temporary appeals, or recognize them as symptoms of a global economic imbalance demanding a structural financial response. Until that happens, every new climate pledge will remain just another number in a ledger that does not balance and Pakistan will continue drowning in someone else’s emissions.