KARACHI:
A UNICEF report published this month placed Pakistan among five countries with the highest exposure to overlapping climate hazards globally. This does not come as a surprise. The finding raises an important question that Pakistan has yet to answer: Why does a country so exposed to climate risks continue to spend far less than climate resilience requires?
Pakistan sits consistently near the top of every climate vulnerability index. The UN Common Country Analysis puts the country’s adaptation and mitigation financing requirement at roughly $348 billion by 2030. Actual expenditure falls far short of that figure. A large share of the international climate funding that does come through arrives as loans rather than grants, which means Pakistan is effectively borrowing to address a crisis it played almost no part in creating. The shortfall is not purely a matter of insufficient foreign support. Climate-linked levies and taxes collected domestically have risen significantly in recent federal budgets. That additional revenue has not been matched by a comparable rise in climate-linked spending, and there is little transparency around how the money collected under climate provisions is actually allocated toward adaptation infrastructure or disaster preparedness. A consistent pattern emerges from this. Pakistan’s approach to climate spending remains reactive, as funds tend to move only after a climate disaster has occurred. Compounding this, the institutional capacity to access and disburse climate finance remains weak.
That Pakistan is among the world’s most climate-exposed nations is no longer in dispute. The more pressing issue is the financing system meant to respond to that exposure. International pledges remain unmet, and domestic funds that have already been collected have yet to reach the people and infrastructure that need them the most.
Maheen Zahra
Lahore
