Climate governance: politics, pretentions and predicament

The rapidity and severity of climate change has, over the years, assumed ominous proportions due to irresponsible and climate-insensitive anthropogenic interventions, especially by the industrialised countries. The disproportional rate of greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions and the consequent exorbitant rise in the global temperature have led to intense changes in weather patterns, out of season torrential rainfalls, devastating floods, recurrent droughts and unprecedented deglaciation. The enormity of crisis is self-evident from the hefty toll and existential threat being posed to the vast variety of bio-life on planet earth and its entire ecosystem.

The global temperature in post-1985 period has risen at an alarming rate from 0.4°C to more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average in 2024 - the hottest year in the recorded history with no indication of this trend abating. Globally, the climate change related events have inflicted around $162 billion losses by the first half of 2025. Pakistan, being the most climate-vulnerable country in the world (Climate Risk Index 2025) has recurrently endured the ferocity of climate change induced torrential rains and devastating floods. According to the 19 September report of National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), around 1,006 people and 6,509 livestock have been killed while around 12,569 houses, 239 bridges and 1981 kilometers of roads have been destroyed by the heavy floods. Over 2.2 million hectares of cropland mostly in Punjab has been inundated damaging about 50% of rice and 60% of cotton and maize crops. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA) estimates that more than six million people have been affected out of whom around 2.5 million have been displaced since the onset of the unusual heavy monsoon rains in late June.

Lamentably, high-consumption and fossil-fuel led productions patterns in the developed countries continue to propel global warming and soaring carbon emissions to the great detriment of climate vulnerable countries like Pakistan. Even the emerging economies like China, Brazil and India, in their unbridled quest for rapid development, have opted for the EU-US inspired model of fossils-fuel led growth.

To add to the gravity of the situation, the world population of 8.2 billion, which has a complex bi-directional relationship with climate change, is expected to increase to 9.8 billion by 2050. This duo of unsustainable consumption-production patterns and high population growth could potentially lead to a massive escalation of GHG emissions, increase in the temperature to more than 3°C by end of 21st century and ensuing devastating climate change implications for earth's fragile ecosystem.

The global efforts to address the climate change threat to human survival and earth's environmental integrity seem to have floundered all along by myopic political exigency, pretentious rhetoric and interest-based contestation regarding the truth of its scientific universalism. In the midst of this imbroglio, the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio De Janeiro formally recognised climate change as a global issue and laid out specific principles for sustainable development. While apportioning the culpability on the developed countries, it introduced the concept of common but differentiated responsibilities to obligate them to share the major burden for combating climate crisis. The same year, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) resolved to stabilise GHG emissions "at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system". Operationalised through the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, UNFCCC imposed legally binding emissions targets on 37 developed countries to reduce emissions by an average of 5% below 1990 levels during the first commitment period (2008-2012). The United States did not ratify it and Canada withdrew later in 2011.

A major breakthrough was, however, achieved in 2015 through adoption of Paris Agreement by 195 Parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) to reduce GHG emissions and contain the global average temperature rise to 1.5°C above the pre-industrial levels by the end of 21st century. Further, GHG emissions were to be reduced up to 45% by 2030 from 2010 levels, or halved compared to 1990 levels. All countries were required to submit voluntary national emission targets or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to be reviewed every 5 years at the Global Stockade. However, the progress on implementation of NDCs fall far short of the targets i.e. by the end February 2025 deadline to publish NDCs, just 13 of 195 parties had done so.

The major problem for this dereliction lies in the design defect of the global climate governance system (GCGS) which continues to find itself embroiled in aborted attempts to reconcile its three interlinked components - the research and knowledge-based scientific universalism as propagated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and UNFCCC Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA); intergovernmental negotiation processes at the Conference of Parties (COPs); and the UN institutional path dependence sanctifying the supremacy of state sovereignty. The consensus rule for decision making further severely constrains GCGS to formulate just ecological responses or enforce NDCs commitments - it institutionally perpetuates the enduring asymmetries, power differentials and skewed burden of responsibility between the Global North and South.

Pakistan, as the most climate-vulnerable country, therefore needs to actively engage in conjunction with the Global South at all levels for reform and establishment of a robust and science-led apolitical GCGS. The consensus rule must be replaced by a "two-thirds majority" for decision-making with a view to reconciling the inextricable connect between the techno-scientific universalism of climate truth and the state sovereignty dynamics. The system should be fully empowered to enforce legally binding climate action plans, NDCs and financial commitments and penalise the deviant states. At the national level, the country has to streamline its fragmented policy, institutional and planning and programming frameworks to deal with the enormity of climate crisis. An inclusive and collective effort vertically integrating government, non-government and private sector players from local to national levels is quintessential for the purpose. Climate change is not a remote threat; it is the defining crisis of our times.