Model Essay: Climate Change and Pakistan's Vulnerabilities

The essay below is written as a candidate would submit it under exam conditions — approximately 1,400 words, with introduction, six body sections and conclusion. A short commentary follows.

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In the summer of 2022, after a heatwave that drove temperatures in Jacobabad past 50°C, an unprecedented monsoon submerged a third of Pakistan under water. By the time the floodwaters receded, 1,739 people had died, more than eight million had been displaced, and an estimated $30 billion in damage had been recorded — a sum roughly equivalent to 10% of national GDP. The catastrophe arrived in a country responsible for less than 1% of global cumulative greenhouse-gas emissions. That arithmetic — vast vulnerability paired with negligible contribution — is the defining condition of Pakistan's climate predicament. The crisis is not one the country has caused, but it is one the country must learn to live with, adapt to, and finance. This essay argues that Pakistan's climate vulnerability is best understood not as a single environmental problem but as a multiplier of every other governance challenge — water, energy, food, urbanisation and security — and that the response must be cross-sectoral rather than confined to the environment ministry.

The first dimension of Pakistan's vulnerability is physical geography. The country sits at the southern edge of the Hindu Kush–Karakoram–Himalaya glacier system, which feeds the Indus through tributary rivers that account for roughly 80% of all freshwater inflows. Glaciologists at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development estimate that one-third of this glacier mass will be lost by 2100 even under low-emission scenarios; under business-as-usual, two-thirds. The short-term consequence is more catastrophic glacial-lake outburst floods of the kind that destroyed the Hassanabad bridge in 2022. The long-term consequence is a steady decline in dry-season river flows on which 90% of Pakistan's agriculture depends. The country is, in effect, drawing on a frozen savings account that is being closed.

The second dimension is monsoon volatility. Pakistan has always lived between the snow and the monsoon, but the rhythm of both is shifting. The 2010 and 2022 floods, the 2015 Karachi heatwave that killed 1,200 people, the 2018–19 drought in Tharparkar, and the 2024 super-floods in the Hub-Lasbela belt are not isolated events. They are points on a curve. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change ranks Pakistan as the 5th most climate-vulnerable country in the world on its Global Climate Risk Index — a ranking that, far from being symbolic, translates into measurable losses of crop yield, livestock and fiscal capacity each year.

The third dimension is economic exposure. Roughly 38% of Pakistan's labour force works in agriculture; over half of all exports — textiles, leather, rice, surgical instruments — depend on rural inputs. A 1°C rise in mean temperature reduces wheat yields by an estimated 6–10%, according to PARC field trials in Punjab and Sindh. The 2022 floods alone destroyed 4.4 million acres of standing crops. Such losses do not stay confined to agriculture. They feed back into food inflation, which drives political pressure on the State Bank's policy rate, which constrains industrial credit, which slows export growth and renews balance-of-payments stress. Climate, in Pakistan, is a macroeconomic variable.

The fourth dimension is urban exposure. Karachi, Lahore, Faisalabad and Multan all sit in zones projected to experience more frequent heatwaves above 45°C. Karachi's drainage system, designed for a city of three million, now serves nearly twenty million, and the 2020 monsoon left major arteries impassable for days. Lahore's air-quality index regularly exceeds 400 in winter, costing the average resident an estimated four to seven years of life expectancy according to the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago's 2023 Air Quality Life Index. Pakistan's urbanisation rate — at 38% the highest in South Asia — means that climate vulnerability is increasingly an urban-policy question, not merely an agricultural one.

The fifth dimension is financial. Pakistan's per-capita climate-adaptation finance receipt — from the Green Climate Fund, the Adaptation Fund, and bilateral sources combined — has averaged under $2 per person per year, against an estimated adaptation need of over $40 per person. The 2022 COP27 agreement on a Loss and Damage Fund, in which Pakistan played a leading role, has yet to disburse meaningful sums. Domestic climate financing through the State Bank's Green Banking Guidelines and the Pakistan Climate Change Authority remains underfunded relative to scale. Without a multi-fold increase in concessional adaptation finance — and a credible domestic absorption capacity for it — even the best-designed plans will sit on shelves.

What, then, is the response? Four tracks are needed in parallel. The first is water management: completion of the Diamer-Bhasha and Mohmand storage projects to capture monsoon surge, modernisation of the Indus canal command to reduce conveyance losses (currently estimated at 40%), and a binding inter-provincial water-accounting system that updates the 1991 Apportionment Accord for a warmer climate. The second is agricultural transformation: rapid scaling of climate-resilient seed varieties through PARC and provincial agriculture departments, drip and sprinkler irrigation, and crop diversification away from water-intensive rice and sugarcane in Sindh and southern Punjab. The third is urban resilience: a national heat-action plan, expanded green cover (Pakistan's tree cover is below 5%, against an FAO recommended minimum of 20%), and stormwater infrastructure designed for the new monsoon. The fourth is international finance and diplomacy: a sustained push for the Loss and Damage Fund to operationalise, leveraging Pakistan's moral standing as the country that paid for emissions it did not cause.

A reform agenda of this scope requires institutional weight that Pakistan currently lacks. The Ministry of Climate Change is under-resourced; provincial environment departments are weaker still; and coordination between water, energy, agriculture and finance ministries is ad hoc. A dedicated National Climate Council, chaired by the Prime Minister and meeting quarterly with binding decision-making power, is the minimum institutional reform. So too is the integration of climate stress-testing into every major infrastructure decision — every new road, dam, plant and housing scheme — through Environmental Impact Assessments that are actually enforced rather than ritually filed.

The temptation, in an age of immediate crises, is to treat climate as a future problem and to focus on inflation, security and politics. That temptation is the most expensive mistake Pakistan can make. The 2022 floods alone cost more than two years of total federal development spending. The 2024 floods, smaller in scale but no less damaging in Balochistan, repeated the pattern. Each future event will arrive sooner than the last, and each will arrive on a country still recovering from the previous one. Climate change, in Pakistan, is not a single disaster waiting to happen. It is the slow recalibration of every system the country depends on — water, food, energy, cities, public finance — into more fragile versions of themselves.

The country's response to that recalibration will define the next half-century more than any other policy choice. Pakistan cannot reduce global emissions; it can, however, build the institutional, financial and physical capacity to absorb the consequences of those emissions without unravelling. That work is unglamorous, expensive, and difficult to claim political credit for. It is also the most consequential policy agenda the state will face in this generation. The choice is not whether to act, but whether to act before the next flood arrives — or after.

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