Pakistan should take advantage of China going green

There is now growing consensus around the world that continuing use of fossil fuels for producing the increasing need for energy is causing global warming that has already had devastating consequences. Heavy rains and associated floods and wildfires have become common around the world. Pakistan has not been spared these weather events. The floods of 2025 have followed those that did a lot of damage in 2022 and more will come as the globe continues to warm.

This has been an unusual summer for many parts of the world. High temperatures and droughts have affected most of the American west. There were widespread fires that burnt significant acreage in California, Oregon and Washington states. Fires also burnt the forests on Canada's border with the United States. The smoke produced by the fires was visible in cities as far south as Washington, the American capital. There were also fires in Siberia. Heavy rains in India's western states resulted in floods. Heavy rains also affected Pakistan. This has now become a regular feature of the weather pattern in Pakistan. This time around, there were property damages and death in Chakwal, a city southeast of Islamabad.

Heavy rains in the hills that overlook the city brought landslides that destroyed many houses and killed scores of people. Several areas of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and the centre of its agriculture-based economy was severely affected. According to Umar Afzal, a deputy manager for hydrology at Pakistan's National Disaster Management Agency, "There have been so many extreme weather events coming together — the urban floods, the cloudburst, the glacial outbursts and now these floods in Punjab. It's overwhelming."

The 1960 Indus Water Treaty signed by Pakistan's President Ayub Khan and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru divided the six rivers of the Indus system into two parts. The Western rivers went to Pakistan and those in the east were given to India. Those going to India included the Ravi which flowed past Lahore. However, the river because of the diversion of water by India went dry. The floods of 2025 brought water and life back to the river.

The roaring Ravi River overflowed housing communities, both affluent and poor, built on its banks. In Punjab overall the deluge has forced more than 750,000 people to evacuate their homes, and submerged the crops of rice, maize and vegetables dotting once lush banks of rivers and canals. Coming just three years after record floods in 2022 that submerged a third of Pakistan, the heavy rains have underscored just how devastating and intense rainfalls have become the norm, rather than exception for the country.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has argued that not enough lessons were learnt from the 2022 floods, suggesting that human error such as construction near rivers and late warnings from the authorities have worsened the impact of the heavy rains. "Many of these catastrophes we have seen this summer - the floods in the north and in Punjab now — all have a common feature with communities built in the way of the rivers and interfering with nature. For instance, Park View City — a high-end residential area that was flooded in Lahore — was built with government's approval, on the banks of Ravi River. This was done despite repeated warnings from environmental activists and experts.

One way of dealing with this situation is for the world's industrial nations to move away from the use of fossil fuels for generating energy for industrial, transport and domestic use. Here China is setting an example that needs to be watched and matched around the globe. China's aggressive efforts to develop green energy, if followed by other industrial nations, should bring to an end the dependence the world has had on fossil fuels since the beginning of the industrial age. The Chinese dominance of clean energy industries is "creating the conditions for a decline in fossil fuel use", according to a report by Ember, a research group focused on the prospects for clean energy technologies.

The scale of Chinese production of batteries, solar panels and wind turbines has driven down the price of these technologies by 60 to 90 per cent. According to Ember, in 2024 more than 90 per cent of wind and solar projects commissioned worldwide produced more power cheaply than the cheapest available fossil fuel. China is the engine. It is changing the energy landscape not just domestically but in countries across the world.

"For too long, emerging economies have faced what seemed like a stark trade-off between growth and sustainability," said Suwit Khunkitti, Thailand's former deputy prime minister. The Ember report challenges that assumption. The global community that meets every year under the auspices of the UN has been pressing China to reduce the use of fossil fuels. China still burns more coal than rest of the world combined and emits more climate pollution than the US and Europe. The country has not yet seen a decline in the consumption of coal, though its GHG emissions have reached what seems like a plateau. But that is changing because of the actions taken by the government in Beijing that gave large subsidies for the development and production of products needed to develop green industries.

In 2024, China met 84 per cent of its electricity demand with solar and wind power. That meant that it was able to cut fossil fuel use by 2 per cent despite a growing demand for power. China's economy is now increasingly reliant on the clean energy sector.

Investment and production in clean energy in 2024 contributed nearly $2 trillion to China's GDP, a figure that was around one-tenth of the country's GDP. This is comparable to Australia's entire economy. According to the above cited Ember report, the clean energy sector grew at a rate three times that of China's overall growth rate.

As China is by far the largest foreign investor in the Pakistani economy, Islamabad should turn to Beijing to bring large-scale solar and wind power to Pakistan. On a previous occasion when Pakistan was faced with serious energy shortage which resulted in repeated power outages, Islamabad turned to Beijing for help. The Chinese responded by installing coal-fired plants, some of which were retired by the government in Beijing. This time around, Pakistan should take advantage of the enormous growth in China of green energy and have wind and solar plants included in CPEC, which is being currently redesigned.