Pakistan continues to pay in loss and damages for the carbon emissions of others. This must change
• Sherry Rehman is Pakistan’s climate change minister
The climate crisis has accelerated at pace. When temperatures crossed 53C in Pakistan, the summer of 2022 turned our southern towns into the hottest places on the planet, melting our glaciers, burning our forests, scorching our crops. But nothing prepared the country for the biblical flooding that saw a third of Pakistan inundated by an ocean of water, surpassing even the 2010 disaster in magnitude and frequency.
Scientific modelling now attributes the extreme flooding in our country to the climate crisis, and the catastrophe presents a clear warning to all those who have set their climate clocks to another few decades. Previously unthinkable doomsday scenarios began to look like the inevitable: Sindh and Balochistan provinces transformed into horizon-free planes of unbroken water, with no land to pitch tents on, no rooftops left to huddle on. More than 33 million people were rendered destitute; 1,500 people died while the country struggled, in shock, to pick up the pieces.
Sherry Rehman is Pakistan’s climate change minister and former ambassador to the United States
