On 5 July 2025, the Pakistan Meteorological Department recorded 48.5°C in Chilas, beating the 47.7°C set on 17 July 1997. Bunji reached 46.1°C, passing its own record from 1971. The PMD warned that the heat could speed up snow and glacier melt and set off glacial lake outburst floods in vulnerable valleys during the following week.
That is the hazard Pakistan’s main glacier programme was built for, and on the evidence it works. GLOF-II began in 2017 under the climate ministry and UNDP, with Green Climate Fund support, and covers 24 valleys in ten districts of Gilgit-Baltistan and five districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. UNDP reports 411 flood-protection structures running 39.6 kilometres, 254 early-warning systems installed (174 of them live), and benefits for more than 605,000 people. The engineering is real. The institutions around it are the weak part, and that is my argument: Pakistan’s adaptation problem is now less about how much money is on offer than about whether the state can receive, track and spend what it gets.
The money on offer is still far short. The World Bank’s 2022 country climate report put a comprehensive response through 2030 at about $348 billion, including $152 billion for adaptation and resilience. Donors pledged more than $9 billion at Geneva in January 2023, but a large share was loans or previously committed funds, and disbursement has been slow. With so little fresh grant money, waste is expensive.
Officials would say, with some justification, that the machinery is being built. GLOF-II is one example. Punjab is another: its 2025-26 budget carries Rs795 billion under a climate tagging framework. Senior Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb told Dawn that this is about 64 percent of the provincial development programme, that it spans every sector rather than only the environment department, and that it will be tracked through output-based budgeting and third-party validation with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Tagging is a reasonable way to mainstream climate spending. The test is whether it changes what gets built. In the same report, WWF-Pakistan’s director general said it was still unclear which projects the money would fund, and environmentalists pointed to a history of provinces under-using development funds.
Access to international money is the harder test, because climate funds do not work like ordinary aid. The Green Climate Fund and its counterparts release money only to an accredited entity whose financial systems pass strict review. The climate ministry is Pakistan’s National Designated Authority to the GCF, so it can endorse proposals, but an endorsement is not a disbursement. The cost shows in the totals. As of 2025, Pakistan had $331.7 million from the GCF for 11 projects, against $464.3 million for Bangladesh and about $1 billion for India, a gap the PIDE paper attributes to institutional capacity. When Punjab’s Environment Protection Agency sought accreditation, it first needed an international consultancy to run an institutional gap assessment. The National Disaster Risk Management Fund is one of the few Pakistani bodies with the required capacity, and it stands out as a rare success.
The clearest evidence sits in the law Pakistan wrote for itself. The Climate Change Act of 2017 created a Council, an Authority and a Fund. Seven years on, neither the Authority nor the Fund existed, and in May 2024 a three-judge Supreme Court bench ordered the federal government to set up the Authority within a fortnight, on a petition from the Public Interest Law Association of Pakistan. It was created that year. A year later, the IMF’s May 2025 country report called it “largely non-functional,” citing operational delays and unclear roles between the Authority and the Ministry, and said the Fund was still to be established. I have found no public record since of the Fund being created.
The constitutional setup makes this harder. The 18th Amendment of 2010 abolished the Concurrent Legislative List and moved many environmental and climate responsibilities to the provinces. Islamabad, however, remains the main channel to international climate funds, while the provinces hold the implementation powers and local knowledge. A donor therefore meets a federal ministry with a shrinking budget and an Authority that barely functions, while the work falls to provincial departments, many of which depend on outside support to prepare proposals.
The federal budget shows the same pattern. FY26 was Pakistan’s first comprehensive climate-tagged budget under IMF supervision. In it, the climate ministry’s own allocation fell from Rs3.5 billion to Rs2.7 billion, and environment protection funding from Rs7.2 billion to Rs3.1 billion. Adaptation received Rs85.43 billion against Rs603 billion for mitigation and clean energy, about 12 percent of the tagged total by PIDE’s count, even though the finance minister has called adaptation the bigger issue. Former climate minister Malik Amin Aslam told Dawn the tagging was a good exercise but amounted to “repackaging old wine in new bottles,” relabelling existing spending, mostly on hydropower dams, as climate resilience.
Pakistan’s climate diplomacy has been more effective abroad than its institutions have been at home. It helped secure global agreement on the Loss and Damage Fund at COP27. But that fund, like the GCF, the Global Environment Facility and the Adaptation Fund, needs an accredited recipient, and as of April 2025 it held pledges of about $768 million from 27 contributors, against estimated annual needs of $290 billion to $580 billion across low- and middle-income countries by 2030. The case for climate justice has been made. Collecting on it depends on domestic institutions that a diplomatic win cannot replace.
Pakistan does not need another framework law, because it already has one. It needs a functioning Fund, an Authority with defined powers, project-level breakdowns of tagged spending, and a few national institutions that can pass accreditation without an international consultancy doing the groundwork. Each of these is a decision for Islamabad and the provinces, not for donors. Until they are taken, every new pledge lands on the same bottleneck.
Waleed Akhtar
Muhammad Waleed Akhtar is a graduate in International Relations from International Islamic University, Islamabad. His work focuses on South Asian security dynamics, regional institutional frameworks, and climate governance and adaptation in Pakistan. He can be reached at waleedsidhu91@gmail.com.
