Arshad Mahmood Awan
Pakistan faces a deepening contradiction at the heart of its public policy. The country confronts an expanding and increasingly dangerous array of climate threats, yet it has chosen this precise moment to reduce spending on the institutions responsible for managing them. The decision to cut the climate ministry’s development budget allocation from Rs3.5 billion to Rs2.48 billion is difficult to defend under any serious examination of the challenges that lie ahead.
The evidence of accelerating climate risk is not abstract. It is measurable, documented, and already affecting communities across the country. Pakistan’s space agency Suparco has identified 130 potentially dangerous glacial lakes in the northern regions, with downstream populations exposed to the devastating threat of glacial lake outburst floods. Of these, 24 lakes are currently unfrozen and under active observation. The findings paint a clear picture: Pakistan’s glaciers are under increasing and intensifying stress.
Rising temperatures are accelerating glacial melt across a country that contains one of the largest concentrations of glacial ice outside the polar regions. The danger extends well beyond the immediate threat of outburst floods. As glaciers retreat over the coming decades, the long-term reliability of river flows that sustain agriculture, power generation, and drinking water supplies for tens of millions of people comes into serious question. The water security of entire regions is bound to the fate of these glaciers, and that fate is worsening with each passing year.
The climate outlook compounds these concerns further. Suparco has warned that El Niño conditions are likely to bring weaker monsoon rainfall, more frequent and intense heatwaves, drought conditions across vulnerable zones, and warmer winters. Each of these shifts carries direct consequences for crop yields, livestock production, and water availability. Extreme heat alone imposes measurable economic costs through lost labour productivity, surging energy demand, and mounting public health burdens. Drought conditions threaten food security and generate inflationary pressure. Erratic and unpredictable rainfall continues to expose communities to the twin dangers of flooding and water scarcity, often within the same agricultural cycle.
Climate change, viewed through this lens, is not merely an environmental concern. It is an accelerating fiscal challenge. Every major climate event forces governments to divert already scarce resources away from development priorities and toward emergency relief, reconstruction, and compensation. Repeated climate shocks discourage private investment, disrupt supply chains, and impose additional strain on an economy already struggling with tight fiscal space and elevated debt levels. Pakistan’s recent experience makes this dynamic impossible to ignore.
The floods of 2022 inflicted losses estimated at over thirty billion dollars and generated a reconstruction burden that continues to press upon public finances years later. The lesson embedded in that catastrophe is both simple and urgent: preparedness costs a fraction of what reconstruction demands. Investments in climate monitoring systems, early warning infrastructure, resilient construction, and effective disaster management are not discretionary luxuries that can be deferred when budgets tighten. They are economic safeguards that protect all other public and private investment from destruction.
The broader budget debate raises uncomfortable questions about national priorities. Senator Sherry Rehman was right to challenge the logic of cutting climate spending while hundreds of billions of rupees continue flowing toward loss-making state-owned enterprises that produce little developmental return. The contrast is stark and the implication is serious. When climate-related hazards are multiplying in frequency and severity, reducing support for adaptation and resilience does not represent fiscal prudence. It represents a costly policy error whose consequences will arrive with compound interest.
Pakistan cannot unilaterally influence global emissions trajectories. It cannot alter the decisions of the world’s largest polluters or reverse the warming that decades of industrial activity have already locked into the atmosphere. What Pakistan can do is strengthen its own capacity to cope with the consequences of a changing climate. That requires sustained and growing investment, not cuts. It requires stronger institutions with adequate resources, not agencies stripped of their operational capacity. It requires long-term planning that integrates climate risk into every dimension of infrastructure, agriculture, water management, and urban development.
The country’s climate vulnerabilities are becoming more visible and more consequential with each passing season. Glaciers are retreating. Extreme weather events are intensifying. Communities that once experienced predictable monsoons now face erratic rainfall that floods one district and leaves a neighbouring one parched. The patterns that farmers, planners, and engineers built their assumptions around are shifting in ways that demand active, funded, and institutionally serious responses.
Reducing the budget of the very ministry tasked with managing these risks sends precisely the wrong signal at precisely the wrong time. Pakistan cannot afford to treat climate preparedness as expendable. The cost of ignoring these risks today will be measured in lives, livelihoods, and billions of rupees in damage that could have been prevented. The time to invest is before the next disaster, not after it.
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