By Nisha Fayyaz

Last August, a single hour of heavy rain fell on Buner, a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In that one hour, the area got almost 15 percent of the rain it normally gets in a whole year. Water and rocks came rushing down the mountains into villages below. People had almost no time to run. By the time it was over, more than 500 people were dead.
Pakistan did not cause that storm. In fact, Pakistan barely adds anything to the pollution that is warming our planet. And yet, almost every year, it is Pakistan’s villages that flood, Pakistan’s crops that fail, and Pakistan’s people who die in heatwaves and floods. This is the strange and unfair truth about climate change in Pakistan today — a country that did very little to create the problem is now living through some of its worst effects.
How Much Does Pakistan Actually Pollute?
According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Pakistan produces only about 1 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases — the gases that trap heat and cause global warming. Some other research groups put the number even lower, closer to 0.8 percent. On a per-person basis, the average Pakistani produces far less carbon pollution than the average person living in the United States, Europe, or China. In fact, the global average person produces about three times more carbon than the average Pakistani.
In comparison, just six places in the world — China, the United States, India, the European Union, Russia, and Indonesia — are responsible for more than 60 percent of all the greenhouse gases produced on Earth. These same six also use most of the world’s energy and make up most of its economy. This is exactly the argument Pakistan has been making at big climate meetings like COP for years: a country that causes so little of the problem should not have to suffer the most because of it.
But Pakistan Suffers the Most
Sadly, causing less pollution has not protected Pakistan from harm — if anything, the opposite seems true. On the ND-GAIN Index, a well-known ranking made by the University of Notre Dame that measures how much danger a country faces from climate change, Pakistan sits at number 146 out of all the countries studied. That makes it one of the most at-risk nations on Earth. A 2025 study funded by the German government went even further, saying Pakistan may be the single most vulnerable country to climate change in the entire world, ahead of every other nation studied.
The United Nations’ own disaster relief agency, OCHA, agrees with this assessment. In its 2026 report on Pakistan’s monsoon season, it directly called Pakistan “the epicenter of climate change” and placed it among the top ten countries most at risk from floods, glacier lake bursts, droughts, and heatwaves.
Even a ranking that sounds positive tells the same sad story underneath. Pakistan is ranked 15th out of many countries on the Climate Change Performance Index for 2026, which sounds like good news. But experts who study the index say this good ranking is mainly because Pakistan is a poorer country that uses very little energy overall — not because its government has especially strong climate policies. In fact, the same report says Pakistan’s use of clean, renewable energy like solar and wind power is still very low, and that its energy grid has serious problems getting electricity to where it’s needed.
A Painful Year: 2025 and 2026
The last year and a half have shown just how real this danger has become. Heavy monsoon rains between July and September 2025 caused widespread floods across the country. The total rainfall was 23 percent higher than what is considered normal. According to Pakistan’s own Economic Survey report, these floods caused losses of about Rs 822 billion, killed more than 1,037 people, injured over a thousand more, and forced over 4 million people to leave their homes. The damage was so serious that the government had to lower its economic growth target for the entire year, from 4.2 percent down to somewhere between 3.5 and 3.9 percent.
A detailed study by the World Bank looked closely at the flash floods that hit Buner, Shangla, and Swat districts that same August. Researchers surveyed more than 1,200 families and found that 85 percent of them received no warning at all before the flood hit their homes. Of the families that did get some warning, half of them had less than thirty minutes to grab their things and run. In one village, the only warning system that actually worked was a local mosque’s loudspeaker, switched on after the imam received a phone call from a relative living further up the valley.
“It was normal raining with no signs of the disaster it would cause. The cloudburst did not give us time to plan.”
— A district official in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, describing the August 2025 flash floods
The extreme heat has been just as dangerous as the floods. Pakistan’s Economic Survey says 2025 was the country’s second-hottest year in the last 65 years, with average temperatures reaching 23.9°C across the country. This heat did not stop when the year changed — it carried straight into 2026. In May, Karachi recorded its hottest day since 2018, with temperatures above 44°C, and at least ten people died from heat-related illness in Sindh within just a few days. By July, the city of Dadu recorded a shocking new record of 51.5°C, one of the highest temperatures ever measured in the region, forcing officials to issue emergency warnings telling children and elderly people to stay indoors.
None of this has happened separately from what came before. The country is still recovering from the massive floods of 2022, sometimes called Pakistan’s “super floods.” Those floods put nearly one-third of the entire country underwater, affected an estimated 33 million people, displaced 8 million from their homes, and caused between $30 and $40 billion in total damage and economic loss, according to the World Bank. Nearly nine million more people were pushed into poverty as a direct result of that single disaster.
It’s Not Just Bad Luck — It’s Also Bad Planning
It would be easy to say Pakistan is simply unlucky because of where it sits on the map, close to melting Himalayan glaciers and in the direct path of the seasonal monsoon. But a 2026 research paper by Muhammad Umar Farooq, a scholar at Riphah International University, argues that the problem runs deeper than geography alone. He explains that Pakistan actually has many good climate laws and official plans written down on paper — the real problem is that these plans are rarely put into action properly on the ground.
According to this research, weak coordination between the federal government and the provinces, combined with short-term political thinking and poor land-use planning, all make natural disasters worse than they need to be. The paper points directly to the 2022 floods as an example, arguing that badly regulated construction and weak disaster preparedness turned a serious but manageable monsoon into a full-blown national catastrophe.
This gap in planning has a very real human cost. Research by Amnesty International, done together with a Pakistani health organization, found that after major floods, more children and elderly people die from diseases spread by dirty flood water, because local hospitals are simply not prepared to handle the sudden rise in patients. About 70 percent of Pakistan’s workers have informal jobs, which means they earn no money at all if they cannot go to work — even during a deadly heatwave. Making matters worse, Pakistan’s government currently spends only about 1 percent of its total budget on healthcare, far below the 5 to 6 percent that health experts recommend for a country to provide proper care for its people.
The same World Bank study also found a troubling gender gap in disaster response. Women made up just 1.8 percent of the province’s main rescue service, and in more than half of the households that received some warning, women only found out because a male family member told them — meaning many had less time to prepare or escape.
What Pakistan Is Doing About It
To its credit, Pakistan has not simply been sitting still and waiting for help. In September 2025, the government submitted an updated climate action plan to the United Nations, known as an NDC, promising to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by the year 2035, compared to what they would otherwise be. The plan also raises Pakistan’s own unconditional emissions-cutting target from 15 percent to 17 percent, and places new focus on protecting women, youth, and local communities as the country adapts to a changing climate.
However, the plan itself admits that Pakistan needs an estimated $565.7 billion to fully carry out all of these climate actions — an enormous sum of money that a country already struggling economically simply does not have sitting in reserve. This is exactly why Pakistan continues to ask wealthier, more heavily polluting countries for what is called climate finance: money meant to help poorer nations deal with a crisis that, by the numbers, they did almost nothing to create.
At the COP30 climate summit held in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025, world leaders from nearly every country agreed on a new set of goals to increase this kind of climate funding, along with plans to better support countries dealing with permanent loss and damage from climate disasters. Pakistani diplomats had been pushing hard for exactly this outcome for several years, arguing that vulnerable countries like Pakistan cannot be expected to adapt and rebuild using their own limited resources alone.
A Fair Ask
Pakistan’s story is simple to understand, even though the politics surrounding it are complicated. A country responsible for only about 1 percent of the world’s climate problem has lost over a thousand lives to a single flood season, watched a city record one of the hottest temperatures ever measured in the region, and been forced to lower its economic growth target — all within the span of about a year and a half.
Better planning at home would certainly help save more lives in the future, and Pakistan’s own researchers are right to push for stronger institutions and faster action on existing climate laws. But no amount of local reform, however well designed, can raise the hundreds of billions of dollars that Pakistan genuinely needs to protect its people and rebuild after each new disaster. Until the rest of the world steps up with real, reliable climate funding, Pakistan will remain stuck in an unfair and painful position: a very small part of the problem, yet one of its very biggest victims.