Blog

THERE was a sense of déjà vu when Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Tuesday ‘formally’ launched Pakistan’s New Energy Vehicle Policy 2025-30. The same policy had, after all, been ‘officially’ launched on June 19, according to a PID press release issued on the same date. Perhaps the government is so enamoured with this achievement that it felt it necessary to talk about it twice. All that seemed different this time was the presence of the prime minister and his gifts. He handed over several electric scooters to high-achieving Intermediate students, promising more in the years to come. His office insisted that this event formally marked the effective date of the NEV policy. All this is well and good: one hopes that the actual policy will yield its intended benefits. The last attempt to formalise Pakistan’s approach to NEVs quickly fell apart. Launched in 2019 by the PTI government, the previous policy was abandoned due to the upheaval caused by Covid-19. Now, the government has reworked it and presented it as a means to save billions annually on petroleum imports and reduce urban air pollution, “which costs us over Rs105bn in healthcare and productivity losses”.

These are noble aims, indeed. The NEV policy’s ambition also deserves to be applauded: it aims for 30pc of all new vehicle sales to be electric by 2030, and sets an even more enterprising goal of 90pc by 2040. If these benchmarks can be achieved, it would mean this government would have triggered an energy revolution as significant as Pakistan’s globally celebrated transition to solar energy. However, many concerns remain about the policy’s viability. The key question is whether vehicle manufacturers will pass on real incentives to consumers, or repeat the industry’s old practice of maintaining high margins and giving minimal thought to the environmental impact of their activities. Unless the value proposition of NEVs becomes clear to consumers, those targets will prove difficult to attain. A key concern will be the quality of batteries sold in Pakistan, which the government must consider regulating. Charging infrastructure and battery-swapping facilities will also require sustained investment over a long period of time. Therefore, instead of grand events to celebrate NEVs, what Pakistan needs more is commitment and consistency. It has sown the seeds; now it must water the soil and hope it bears fruit.

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2025

THE timing of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s lament that Pakistan has not drawn any lessons from previous climate-triggered disasters coincides with the launch of the 11th National Finance Commission on the distribution of resources between the federal and provincial governments.

Both exercises will need to converge on the local sources of Pakistan’s climate vulnerability and financing. The seesawing between the federation and provinces over the distribution of finances has cast a dark shadow over national climate and economic vulnerabilities. With the cost of reconstruction, development, debt and defence increasing, the resource trickle is dwindling further. Are there any lessons in the NFC awards to help respond to the PM’s lament?

Climate vulnerability at the district level has three basic drivers:

Population growth: In what constitutes Pakistan today, the population has exploded from 33.7 million in 1951 to 242.7m in 2025, and is projected to reach 380-403m by 2050, making it the world’s third most populous nation. This demographic explosion, coupled with economic stagnation and declining per capita income, creates escalating climate vulnerability.

Currently, 108m people, or 42.3 per cent of the population, according to a recent World Bank study, live below the poverty line with limited adaptive capacity.

Under business-as-usual scenarios, 190-200m people could be in poverty by 2050 — nearly half the projected population. In brief, every other child born in Pakistan will now be born to families below the poverty line — leaving them unable to afford climate adaptation and disaster recovery. This vast population spread in the high-risk areas of 169 districts with about 1,200 tehsils represents Pakistan’s most critical vulnerability driver.

Are there any lessons in the NFC awards to help respond to the PM’s lament?

Disproportionate exposure: The second key driver is the disproportionate concentration of the poor in high-risk areas. Data shows that in recent years, 18-26 districts have faced droughts in Balochistan and Sindh, 18 faced glacial lake outburst floods in Gilgit-Baltistan and KP, six faced tropical storms in Sindh and Balochistan and 84 districts were hit by floods across the provinces, not to mention urban flooding, forest fires, landslides and cloudbursts. Each district is exposed to two or more types of climate disasters.

The vulnerable populations are clustered in regions that are most susceptible to climate shocks, including low-lying floodplains, marginalised farmland and unauthorised settlements on riverbeds and urban peripheries. This geographical alignment guarantees that in the event of a climate disaster, the poor are hit first and the hardest, as their settlements are the most exposed and least resilient.

Limited adaptive capacity: Finally, low per capita income severely limits the adaptive capacity of our population. With a 2024 GDP per capita of just $1,485, and projections suggesting a decline to $1,200-$1,300 by 2050, the poor have virtually no financial buffer to absorb climate shocks.

The massive economic losses from climate events further drain resources, making it nearly impossible for individuals to invest in their assets: housing, livestock, standing crops, lives and microenterprises. This lack of financial capacity creates a vicious cycle of poverty and disaster.

Against this backdrop, what lessons can be drawn to respond to the PM’s remarks?

Incremental changes: Some answers by policy managers can be inferred: more resources for infrastructure to fill the financial gaps for recovery, reconstruction and rehabilitation from previous disasters; early warning systems; financing for the staggering 1,071 pending PC-1s; and upgradation of equipment or building new infrastructure. Other important elements include improved inter-agency cooperation, capacity-building, and access to international climate finance.

Many of these won’t be new lessons, but it is still important for each agency to develop and share its lessons. While these needs are necessary for government efficiency, where are the transformative lessons?

Transformative changes: Several initiatives remain trapped in approval processes: promoting land-use planning to guide human settlements away from low-lying flood-prone regions to designated safer areas; adaptive social protection to invest precious resources in damage prevention rather than post-disaster recovery; creation of sub-national disaster risk financing facilities; adoption of resilient construction standards; mandatory insurance for public sector infrastructure in PC-1 proposals; risk transfer and insurance mechanisms to prevent governments from harvesting unspent funds from development projects; and earnest implementation of climate risk screening for public sector portfolios.

The delays in their operationalisation and absence of prioritisation erode the synergistic impact necessary for transformative change. All of them, however, establish project-level, not policy-level, programmatic and strategic direction for our safe journey into the future.

Four transformative lessons: Pakistan’s climate adaptation demands structural governance transformation. Top-down interventions have failed to generate ownership. Globally, bottom-up initiatives by elected local governments increase implementation and accountability systems. Four key lessons emerge from entrusting district-level decision-making.

First, local communities, and not distant bureaucrats, must manage land-use planning at the tehsil and district levels. Second, locally developed zoning laws must protect shamilaat, communal and state lands from vested interests and ban high-risk development. Third, reclamation of the encroached commons must be achieved through local-level resilience management action plans that restore the natural flood management capacity. Fourth, districts must develop asset inventories as revenue sources using credible valuation mechanisms for standardised property assessments.

Given this scale, it’s the right time to establish a ‘National Reclamation Commission’ to develop a national framework and provincial guidelines for local actions.

Learning challenge: Learning is expensive. To learn from climate disasters, Pakistan must ‘unlearn’ destructive practices: ending floodplain encroachment and not treating communal lands as private profit centres. This process can be negotiated but requires decisive political pushback against powerful networks.

Despite decades of disasters, Pakistan repeats its mistakes: allowing encroachment, enabling elite capture, treating prevention as an expense rather than an investment. Lessons remain unlearned because learning requires confronting power, not merely studying flood patterns or providing relief assistance.

True climate adaptation demands political consensus and the courage to implement what we already know but refuse to do. Let the NFC award spearhead this transformation.

The writer is a climate change and sustainable development expert.

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2025