Pakistan and the Asian Development Bank on Tuesday signed two major climate resilience initiatives worth $304 million–one focused on Sindh and the other on Punjab. The announcement was greeted with donor praise and bureaucratic satisfaction. Why shouldn’t it? In a country battered annually by floods, heatwaves and toxic smog, few would dispute the urgency of investing in resilience. Yet the celebration obscures a harder question that Pakistan has been forced to ask too often: why must a nation responsible for a tiny fraction of global emissions borrow its way out of a crisis it did not create?
Pakistan’s floods and heatwaves are now annual events. Last year’s monsoon submerged huge swathes of land and killed thousands. Winter smog continues to paralyse major cities. More than failures of imagination or planning, all of these speak to the lived consequences of a warming planet for one of its most exposed societies. Pakistan has done what responsible states are told to do. It has signed climate laws, created institutions, cooperated with multilateral lenders, and opened its books to international scrutiny. It has repeatedly appealed for climate justice rather than charity. What it has received instead is delay, dilution and debt.
Of the $304m now being showcased as “resilience” funding, only a sliver comes as grants. The rest will be repaid, adding to a debt burden shaped by decades of external shocks and strategic dependency. After 2022’s catastrophic floods, Pakistan was promised solidarity on a scale commensurate with the damage. What arrived was a trickle, much of it repayable, even as debt-servicing pressures tighten every budget. Pakistan now owes roughly 78% of its GDP to external creditors. In 2025-26 alone, Islamabad must find $26?billion to service debt to creditors, including China, the IMF and the ADB. This is where the moral imbalance becomes impossible to ignore. Industrialised economies built their wealth by burning fossil fuels without constraint. Pakistan did not. However, when climate impacts devastate our farms, cities and coastlines, the response is not reparative finance but balance-sheet caution.
All this does not excuse Pakistan’s own governance failures. We waited until 2017 to pass a Climate Change Act, and even after that, little has been done to fix accountability. Disaster management remains fragmented, and implementation, painfully slow. Early warnings often come as vague forecasts rather than actionable alerts, leaving local agencies paralysed rather than prepared. These shortcomings are real and costly. But they cannot be separated from a reality in which Pakistan is asked simultaneously to service debt, stabilise its economy and absorb climate shocks it did not produce.
More worryingly, climate finance for Pakistan rarely attracts the outrage reserved for far smaller interventions elsewhere. There is little sustained examination of whether current models actually reduce vulnerability or simply create new dependencies. Pakistan has not demanded anything out of the ordinary. It is asking for a climate response that does not deepen macroeconomic fragility. Like it or not, resilience cannot be built if the cost of survival is perpetual indebtedness.
