THERE is a number that should follow Pakistan into every climate conversation it has. Pakistan contributes less than one percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, yet by most global rankings it sits among the five to ten most climate vulnerable countries on earth.
Since 1750, four countries have produced more than half of all cumulative carbon emissions. The United States alone accounts for close to a quarter, followed by China, Russia and Germany. Pakistan barely registers, because its industrial revolution never happened at that scale. The atmosphere does not distinguish between carbon released building steel mills a century ago and carbon warming the Indus basin today. The debt is being paid by people who never took out the loan.
The floods make the arithmetic concrete. In 2022, monsoon rains and melt from the more than thirteen thousand glaciers Pakistan holds, the largest concentration outside the polar regions, put a third of the country underwater. Thirty three million people were affected, eight million displaced, and damages ran past thirty billion dollars. That was supposed to be the disaster that changed the international response. It was not. In 2025 the monsoon returned, affecting nearly seven million people, with Punjab recording its worst flooding in four decades.
Pakistan is not simply unlucky. Its geography sits downstream of accelerating Himalayan glacial melt, and its economy leans on agriculture exposed to erratic monsoons, with far less fiscal room than wealthier nations have to cushion the blow.
The international response has not matched the ask. At COP27 in 2022, the same year Pakistan’s floods dominated headlines, the world agreed in principle to create a Loss and Damage Fund. Pledges did not begin until COP28, and added up to just over seven hundred million dollars, against estimates that loss and damage costs in developing countries could reach four hundred billion dollars a year by 2030. Pakistan’s 2022 damage bill alone was more than forty times larger than the entire global pledge meant for every vulnerable country on earth. None of this excuses Pakistan from its own responsibilities. Smog choking Lahore and Karachi and a power sector still leaning on coal are problems Pakistan can fix through its own choices. But domestic reform and international justice are not competing arguments. A country can tighten its own standards and still be owed a far larger share of global climate finance than it receives.
What makes this moment harder is that the countries with the least responsibility face donor fatigue from the countries with the most, just as floods and heatwaves across South Asia keep rising. That is what happens when climate finance depends on the goodwill of nations least inclined to feel the bill is theirs.
Pakistan’s one percent will not move much in the coming decade, because its industrial base was never large enough to be the problem. What can move is the willingness of major emitters to treat loss and damage financing as an obligation rather than a courtesy. Until that catches up, the water will keep rising, and the bill will keep arriving at the wrong address.
—The writer is an economist, based in Washington DC.
