WHILE the United States continues to dismantle the international climate architecture it once helped build, wars from Ukraine to the Middle East are generating unaccounted emissions, consuming the fiscal space that wealthy nations pledged to climate finance, and returning fossil fuels to the centre of global strategy.

Meanwhile, 2024 was the first calendar year to go above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial level; the critical 1.5°C threshold. The tipping points have arrived. What climate models warned would happen by 2080 is happening already.

At the receiving end stands Pakistan, a country that caused less than 1 per cent of the problem and is living with an outsized share of the consequences.

Its glaciers are melting. Its monsoon no longer arrives on schedule, bringing, instead, either punishing drought or catastrophic flood. Its rivers are caught between a warming mountain range above, and hostile neighbours below.

This is not a collection of separate crises. It is one crisis, with many faces, bearing down on us. And time is running out.

In January this year, the United States withdrew from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the foundational 1992 treaty ratified by the Senate by a vote of 92-0 and upheld by every administration since. It simultaneously withdrew from the Paris Agreement, the IPCC, and the Green Climate Fund.

No country had ever done this before.

The decision was taken in a world already destabilised by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, by a Nato rearmament that has absorbed the fiscal space European governments once directed at climate finance, and by a Gulf energy crisis that has returned fossil fuels to the centre of global strategic thinking.

The Trump administration’s fossil fuel revival and Europe’s sharp turn towards defence spending reflect the same underlying judgment: that security, defined narrowly, takes precedence over survival defined broadly and over time.

Developed countries are choosing to strengthen themselves in the short term at the cost of planetary health and their economies at the cost of the ecosystems that underpin them.

Pakistan did not make this judgment, but it is living with its consequences.

The diversion from climate finance to military spending has dwarfed commitments made at global forums. Pakistan is getting what it does not deserve, stresses Ali Tauqeer Sheikh

The wars generating political realignment are also generating emissions that dwarf the reductions governments have pledged.

The Ukraine war has produced an estimated 230 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent over three years.

The first 15 months of Israel’s war on Gaza generated at least 31 million tonnes. Global military spending reached a record $2.7 trillion in 2024.

Treated as a country, the military sector would rank fourth in the world by emissions, accountable to no climate framework and invisible in every NDC submitted to the UNFCCC.

Military emissions remain exempt from Paris Agreement reporting, a loophole never closed.

The $300 billion climate finance pledge of COP29 is being dismantled by the same governments that signed it.

The UK cut real-terms climate finance by roughly 50pc to fund defence spending.

Germany and several other EU countries have made equivalent choices.

The US has cut international climate finance to zero, and is actively working to dismantle both its own domestic climate commitments and the global agreements it once helped build.

Closer to home, Pakistan’s military standoff with India in May 2025 distracted focus from the regional climate agenda at the precise moment NDC 3.0 implementation needed to be consolidated.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has exposed how shallow the global energy transition remains beneath its headline numbers.

When the Strait closed, the response of major Asian economies was to scramble for alternative fossil fuel supply, reactivate mothballed coal plants, and sign emergency LNG contracts at premium prices.

India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and the Philippines increased coal-burn during the crisis. Japan and South Korea extended the operational life of coal and gas plants they had pledged to retire. Across Asia, coal is not a relic of the past.

It is the backstop that governments reach for the moment energy security is threatened, and the Hormuz closure was a reminder of how quickly that moment can arrive.

The IEA had projected fossil fuel demand peaking before 2030. The Hormuz crisis, arriving on top of the Ukraine war, has put that projection in a serious doubt.

For Pakistan, which had begun to reduce its LNG import exposure through grassroots solar revolution, the lesson is both cautionary and instructive: the energy transition is real, but it is fragile, and every geopolitical shock tests whether governments have the institutional resolve to stay the course, or the political instinct to retreat to the fuel they know.

The grand ambitions of successive COPs, from the $100 billion promise of Copenhagen to the 1.5°C target of Paris and to the $300 billion pledge of Baku, today look like agreements made in a different world.

Belem in November 2025 left the Loss and Damage Fund critically underfunded and substituted voluntary initiatives for binding ones.

Meanwhile the same governments that signed these pledges are spending that record $2.7 trillion annually on military hardware and cutting their climate finance budgets to fund it.

Multiplied across the EU and the US, the cumulative diversion from climate finance to military spending dwarfs every commitment made at every COP since Copenhagen.

The bill for that choice is being paid by Pakistan and countries across the Global South — absorbing, year after year, the consequences of decisions made in capitals far from their own.

Global targets have slipped

The Paris Agreement is failing.

In 2024, the global average surface temperature reached 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels, the first calendar year to breach the Paris threshold.

The three-year period ending in 2025 averaged above 1.5°C. Atmospheric CO2 is at its highest in two million years. The UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2025 finds that even full NDC implementation would deliver 2.3-2.5°C by 2100.

Current policies track 2.6-3.1°C. The US withdrew from the IPCC at a time when this verdict was being written.

Ecosystems are tipping

Tipping points are activating now.

Warm-water coral reefs have crossed their thermal threshold, with direct consequences for the fish stocks and coastal protection on which hundreds of millions of people in South Asia depend.

Greenland is losing 30 million tonnes of ice per hour.

The Atlantic circulation system (AMOC) that drives the South Asian monsoon is destabilising; its weakening would fundamentally alter the rainfall patterns on which Pakistan, India and Bangladesh have built their agricultural systems over centuries, reducing monsoon intensity in some zones while intensifying it unpredictably in others.

In the Hindu Kush-Himalaya-Karakoram region, glaciers are retreating faster than the global average, draining the rivers that provide freshwater to nearly a billion people across the region.

Along South Asia’s coastlines, the Arabian Sea is warming faster than the global ocean average, intensifying cyclone energy and driving saltwater intrusion into the agricultural land and freshwater aquifers of coastal Sindh and Balochistan as well as Bangladesh’s delta regions.

These systems interact: each one that tips accelerates the others.

The AMOC features in 45pc of all modelled tipping point cascade interactions.

What begins in Greenland arrives, in time, in the Indus Delta.

Pakistan pays the bill

Pakistan’s glaciers are retreating, simultaneously triggering glacial lake outburst floods in the north today and, over the longer term, threatening the dry-season river flows on which 80pc of irrigated agriculture depends.

Floods today, water scarcity tomorrow: two faces of the same crisis.

The monsoon, once the organising rhythm of Pakistan’s agricultural calendar, has become erratic and violent — arriving in concentrated, devastating bursts or failing to arrive at all.

The 2022 floods affected 33 million people and caused $30 billion in losses. Recurrent flooding in 2025 confirmed that nothing structural has changed.

Prolonged droughts in Balochistan and Sindh are driving displacement and deepening cross-border water tensions with Afghanistan and India.

The 1991 Apportionment Accord governs a river system that climate change has fundamentally altered.

The coastline is retreating under accelerating sea-level rise, storm surge, and saltwater intrusion.

Mangroves that once absorbed the majority of cyclone energy along the Karachi coast have been cleared.

The Indus Delta has contracted severely. Per capita water availability has fallen from 5,260 cubic metres in 1951 to approximately 1,000 cubic metres today, placing Pakistan at the threshold of absolute water scarcity.

Four crises — political rupture, military displacement of the climate agenda, accelerating warming and ecological collapse — are not parallel phenomena. They are one system of causation, activating the tipping points.

Pakistan absorbs the consequences of decisions made elsewhere.

Time is running out — faster than the models predicted, in a political environment more hostile than any since the UNFCCC was founded, for a country that did nothing to deserve what is arriving.

The writer represents Pakistan on the International Board of Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage.

IRAN’S war has lessons for Pakistan. Can Iran survive half a century of technological and trade embargoes and infrastructural bombardment? While GDP and foreign reserves are standard metrics of survival, Iran has shown that national endurance is actually measured by the depth of human capital. Even if the political order crumbles, Iran’s foundational capacity to innovate remains an indestructible strategic armour, a result of a deliberate immersion in science, technology, engineering and mathematics that created a workforce capable of withstanding shocks that could disintegrate less complex societies.

Credible climate resilience is not a stand-alone technical fix; it is anchored in a socioeconomic hierarchy that consists of five layers that must be traversed one by one. These layers move sequentially from basic literacy as a social buffer, through skilled labour and high-quality diaspora, to trade-driven technology absorption, to applied STEM innovation under isolation, and finally to a fully integrated knowledge economy where solutions are generated faster than shocks can destroy them.

Foundational literacy: Layer 1, at the base, is foundational literacy, an essential social floor that Pakistan’s 26 million out‑of‑school children currently lack. Without this cognitive bedrock, communities cannot process early warnings or adapt their livelihoods. The recurring cycle of disaster confirms that climate vulnerability is almost always a direct consequence of educational neglect. In all recent floods, losses were highest in districts with the lowest literacy. This correlation spans every province. Communities suffer disproportionately as they lack the cognitive tools for adaptive response.

Credible climate resilience is anchored in a socioeconomic hierarchy that consists of five layers.

The 2022 floods served as a stress test of this missing foundation. The maps of devastation followed the contours of neglect. Yet almost all of Pakistan’s public sector investments and the bulk of loans from multilateral development banks remain hyper-focused on infrastructural development and high-tech early warning systems, while ignoring the human capital that actually determines a nation’s resilience capacity.

Functional human capital: The trajectory of layer-climbing is evident across Asia. At Layer 2, Bangladesh has systematically outpaced Pakistan by prioritising women’s literacy and NGO-led vocational training as prerequisites for economic resilience. Organisations like BRAC and Grameen Bank reached women in rural communities with education, microcredit and vocational training at a scale no government bureaucracy could match. By securing the lower layers first, Bangladesh created a stable social floor that allows its workforce to adapt to climate shocks and market shifts more effectively, as reflected in its emergence as the world leader in certified green garment manufacturing. That floor is now being extended upward: Bangladeshi women are entering the gig and digital economy through mobile platforms, home-based entrepreneurship, and digital financial services, converting the literacy investments of one generation into economic participation in the next.

Trade-anchored upgrading: Sri Lanka demonstrated the social anchor model, where its 92pc literacy rate enabled quick recovery from the civil war and a skilled diaspora prevented total societal collapse during its 2022 sovereign default. Likewise, Vietnam transitioned from a war-devastated agricultural base to a technology manufacturing hub by committing 14pc of national expenditure to education, progressively upgrading from garments to electronics to semiconductors. These Layer 3 examples confirm that resilience layers cannot be skipped; the foundation must be built before a nation can withstand disruptions.

India shows how nations can span multiple layers internally. Though it ranks 38th on the Global Innovation Index, its variance is stark: some states function at Layer 4, while others resemble Pakistan in female literacy and school enrolment.

Applied STEM resilience: Since 1979, Iran has more than doubled its adult literacy rate — from roughly 40pc to nearly 93pc — effectively eliminating the gender gap in basic education. This rapid layer‑climbing was driven by a deliberate focus on rural areas and women, who moved from 30pc literacy to forming the majority of university entrants within a single generation. Around two‑thirds of Iran’s higher‑education output is in technical and scientific fields, reflecting decades of investment in STEM as a survival strategy.

Since the 1979 embargoes began, Iran moved from a dependency‑based economy to Layer 4, marked by technical self‑sufficiency. It built a base of over 2m university students, produced 335,000 STEM graduates a year, and developed world‑class capabilities in nanotechnology, aerospace, AI and biotechnology, producing over 95pc of its medicines domestically. It ranks 34th globally in research output, has produced Fields Medal‑winning mathematicians, and has developed stem‑cell research capacities among the top 20 worldwide. This is the essence of Layer 4 resilience: the ability to re‑engineer, design, and manufacture advanced technology when imports are denied. This knowledge resides in the minds of graduates as a form of capital that cannot be sanctioned or bombed out of existence.

Integrated innovation economy: A vivid comparison exists between Iran and Israel, two nations with divergent political ideologies but a shared resilience DNA rooted in STEM. Both identified scientific depth as a strategic necessity born of existential pressure. Israel represents the global benchmark for Layer 5: its investments have created an ecosystem where military research, world-class universities and venture capital generate solutions faster than regional shocks can destroy them.

Iran’s STEM graduate output far exceeds Israel’s in volume, but the fundamental difference is institutional. Israel converts talent into economic output through a functioning commercialisation ecosystem. Iran possesses the same scientific inputs and a literate and technically trained population, but its capacity to commercialise that talent awaits the lifting of sanctions and governance constraints. For both, the scientific depth is the ultimate guarantor of national resilience, despite high brain drain.

Pakistan’s layer-climbing: Pakistan has not yet fully secured Layer 1. As the late Dr Mahbub-ul Haq would have said, educational attainment is among the strongest predictors of climate mortality. The country’s 265 universities barely produce 445,000 graduates a year, yet fewer than 180,000 are in STEM, barely half of Iran’s, leaving a system wide in enrolment but thin in the specialised depth that turns education into resilience.

The evidence is unambiguous. Nations that invested in their people absorbed wars, defaults and disasters and emerged stronger. Nations that did not are still counting the losses. Pakistan stands at a crossroads.

The writer is a climate change and sustainable development expert.

Published in Dawn, May 7th, 2026