PAKISTAN stands at a crossroads as it prepares to attend COP31 in Turkiye next week. Every October, the Emissions Gap Report brings bad news, and every October we read it as a scorecard of how far the world is from Paris. This year, it is not a progress report. It is notice that the Paris benchmark has been breached.
The United Nations Environment Programme’s 2026 report concludes that the chance to hold warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius with no or limited overshoot “is gone”. The task now is to “minimise overshoot and return to 1.5°C”. The target survives; its meaning has flipped. No longer a ceiling, 1.5°C is a line we will cross and then try to get back under. Even the “lowest possible” overshoot peaks at 1.7 to 1.8°C.
For Pakistan, this is not abstract arithmetic. The gap between 1.5 and 1.8 is more poverty and heat in Jacobabad, wilder monsoons in Sindh, transboundary floods in Punjab, and faster glacial melt in the upper Indus. The question is simple: who pays for the overshoot years?
Just as the science matters most, the body that certifies it is going broke. For the first time in its history, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “might not have the funds to finish an assessment report”, Nature warned recently. Contributions have fallen since 2023, and Washington has walked away. The panel needs more than CHF 20 million ($24m) to survive until 2029, less than many single-donor projects in Islamabad.
Nor can it agree on a timetable. In Addis Ababa last month, governments failed for the sixth meeting running to decide when its next reports come out. A small bloc wants the reports on emission cuts and adaptation delayed until after the 2028 global stocktake, the five-yearly review of progress under Paris. The reasons are procedural; the effect is political. For the most vulnerable countries, that delay is betrayal. Yet Pakistan, the self-declared ground zero of climate impacts, stayed away from the forum that certifies the evidence.
We need some $47bn a year to 2030 but receive under $2bn.
It is not for want of evidence. In August, the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) published How the Climate of Pakistan Has Changed, a 45-year record and the most granular we have. Nights are warming faster than days, and springs across much of the country are up to 2.5°C warmer than in the 1980s and 1990s. Rain has become not scarcer but less dependable: the 2022 monsoon dumped up to 450 per cent above-average rain on the south, and three years later, the winter of 2024-25 brought a 67pc national deficit. That is the overshoot world in miniature.
The EU’s Paris Agreement Overshooting: Reversibility, Climate Impacts and Adaptation Needs (PROVIDE project), which studied exactly such risks, had an Islamabad partner, so the research clearly exists.
What is missing is the habit of carrying it into the rooms where global science, and therefore, global money, is decided. The empty chair reflects a deeper reflex. Pakistan’s climate diplomacy still treats finance as something to ask for: grants, owed as a moral debt by those who caused the problem. The argument is right on the merits and increasingly beside the point.
The COP29 goal of $300 billion a year is being hollowed out by the governments that pledged it, and what grant money remains goes to countries ready to absorb it. On that test, Pakistan fails. We need some $47bn a year to 2030 but receive under $2bn. The gap is not one of vulnerability but readiness.
Meanwhile, a new architecture is taking shape elsewhere, and in one corner of it Pakistan already leads. At the World Bank-IMF annual meetings in Bangkok last month, Islamabad took the chair of the Borrowers’ Platform, which gives debtors what creditors have in the Paris Club: a place to pool data, compare terms, and bargain as a bloc. On Nov 1, it also assumed the chair of the G-24, the developing-country caucus at the IMF and World Bank.
For a year then, Pakistan speaks for the debtors just as debt has become the main channel of climate finance. Disasters are paid for with borrowing, and each recovery loan makes the next shock harder to absorb.
Pakistan, where debt servicing eats 43pc of the federal budget, is itself a textbook case. Of the $10bn pledged at Geneva after the 2022 floods, about $8.7bn came from lenders. We were asked to borrow our way out of a disaster we did little to cause.
New instruments attack this chain link by link. Debt-pause clauses suspend repayments after a disaster; Grenada used one after Hurricane Beryl to defer about $30m. The V20, a bloc of finance ministers from the most climate-vulnerable countries, is building a Lifeline Fund that would pool members’ reserves into a $500m emergency facility. Africa’s new rating agency challenges unfair risk premiums; Mia Mottley’s Bridgetown Initiative demands cheaper, longer loans. Each treats climate as a balance sheet problem, and that is where the post-Paris order is taking shape.
Pakistan now heads the borrowers’ table and leaves an empty chair at the scientists’ table. The two are linked: a debtor bloc that wants climate risk priced into debt terms needs credible, nationally owned evidence, and the IPCC is where such evidence gains global standing.
Four steps follow before Antalya. First, rejoin the science table: pay into the IPCC trust fund, attend the resumed session in December, and back the least developed countries and small islands on a 2028 timeline. Second, put the PMD record to work in AR7, the next Nationally Determined Contributions, and the annual budgets. Third, trade appeals for readiness, with bankable adaptation projects, accredited national entities and climate tagging in the budget. Fourth, use the Borrowers’ Platform chair to make debt-pause clauses standard in sovereign lending and to tie debt and climate together at the stocktake.
The world has moved past the Paris target and is moving past COP as the only place where climate is decided. The winds of change are blowing elsewhere. Pakistan should stop treating COPs as tourist destinations and start engaging where the rules are written.
The writer is a climate expert.
Published in Dawn, November 5th, 2026
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