Pakistan's climate crisis has a degree problem

Pakistan has no shortage of climate change policy documents. From the National Climate Change Policy of 2012, revised comprehensively in 2021, to four provincial climate action plans, a National Adaptation Plan, three rounds of Nationally Determined Contributions, a National Climate Finance Strategy, and an alphabet soup of frameworks in between, the country has assembled an impressive paper arsenal. For a nation that contributes less than one per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions yet ranks among the world's ten most climate-vulnerable countries, this legislative enthusiasm is, on the surface, a welcome sign.

But policy documents do not plant mangroves. They do not model flood inundation zones. They do not prepare MRV (Measurement, Reporting and Verification) submissions to the UNFCCC. People trained in specific disciplines do that. And that is precisely where Pakistan's climate ambition runs headlong into a wall it has been too polite to name.

Studies persistently flag technical expertise as one of the most crippling bottlenecks in Pakistan's climate governance, with many government bodies simply lacking staff trained in climate science or adaptation planning. This is not a funding problem in the first instance. It is a human capital problem, one that traces directly back to what our universities have chosen not to teach.

The popular criticism of Pakistan's climate record is that our policies are paper tigers: impressive on the shelf, inert in practice. That framing, while rhetorically satisfying, lets higher education off the hook far too easily. The more honest explanation for why landmark climate documents are routinely handed to non-technical administrators for implementation is not bureaucratic indifference. It is that there are often no technically trained alternatives available. When a ministry must assign a climate action plan and the pool of genuinely qualified candidates is near-empty, the generalist administrator is not a choice; he is the only option on the table.

This structural vacuum has produced a peculiarity that anyone working in Pakistan's climate sector will recognise: a culture of self-certified expertise. Any professional holding a degree in a science-adjacent discipline, whether physics, chemistry or general biology, is frequently deemed sufficiently qualified to manage complex climate affairs. The logic is as flawed as hiring a physicist to run an analytical chemistry laboratory and expecting peer-reviewed results. Climate change governance is not generic science. It is a highly specialised interdisciplinary domain requiring fluency in emissions accounting, climate modelling, adaptation finance, policy design and international compliance frameworks. A physics degree, however distinguished, does not confer that fluency any more than a chemistry degree prepares someone for cardiac surgery.

The consequences of this misclassification are already materialising in specific, measurable ways. Take greenhouse gas accounting, the process by which companies and governments quantify, verify and report their emissions. Pakistan has committed to reducing its projected 2030 emissions by 50 per cent under its updated NDC, ambitious targets that demand robust and credible GHG inventory systems. Yet corporate GHG accounts management in Pakistan is today largely being handled by environmental consultants operating well beyond their formal training, simply because no specialised pipeline exists to produce dedicated emissions accountants. This is not a criticism of those consultants; their resourcefulness is admirable. It is an indictment of a higher education system that has not responded to a foreseeable and urgent labour market demand.

The same story repeats in climate finance. Building capacity and technical expertise within relevant ministries to identify and mobilise financing from the wide range of international climate finance instruments has been identified as a critical priority. The operationalisation of the Green Climate Fund, carbon markets, green bonds and blended finance mechanisms requires professionals who understand both the financial engineering and the climate science underneath it. Instead, what Pakistan has are environmental science graduates attempting to navigate sovereign climate bonds, and finance professionals who cannot interpret an emissions baseline. Neither serves the country well.

History offers an instructive and uncomfortable parallel. In the early 1990s, Pakistan had no environmental engineering discipline to speak of. When environmental regulations began demanding compliance, civil engineers were pressed into service as environmental engineers, not because they were qualified, but because no one else existed. The consequences took years to correct: poorly designed effluent treatment plants, inadequate environmental impact assessments, and a regulatory culture built on improvisation rather than expertise. Climate change will not extend the same patience. The 2022 floods caused losses exceeding thirty billion dollars. Between 18 and 20 per cent of GDP could be lost annually by 2050 if climate vulnerabilities go unaddressed. The cost of fielding an unqualified workforce in this domain is not merely reputational; it is existential.

The Higher Education Commission and Pakistan's universities must recognise that the country's climate architecture is being constructed on a foundation of borrowed expertise and professional improvisation. The response cannot be another committee or another framework. It must be structural and curricular. Dedicated undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in climate science, GHG accounting, climate risk and finance and climate policy are not luxuries for a country in Pakistan's position. They are prerequisites for converting ambitious policy documents into functioning climate governance.

The challenge for developing countries such as Pakistan is the dearth of expertise in climate change, and unlike flood embankments or solar panels, trained human capital cannot be imported, donated or emergency-procured. It must be grown, deliberately and systematically, inside our own institutions.

Pakistan has always been good at writing the plan. It is long past time to train the people who can execute it.