RECENT catastrophic storms in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka caused severe floods, infrastructure damage, and loss of life; Pakistan experienced the same phenomenon in 2022. Experts warn us that Pakistan will bear the brunt of climate change in the future, even though we contribute less than one per cent of global carbon emissions. Is there any reason to hope, as our glaciers melt and our deltas die, that our children will have a future?

There is, if we pay attention and take action now. Thanks to heightened awareness about climate change, government cooperation and civic involvement in the energy crisis, the government’s reduction of tariffs on imported solar panels spurred national and community mobilisation which put us on the path to optimal solarisation. Today, despite our poor energy policies and our reliance on fossil fuels, Pakistan has become the world’s fourth or fifth largest solarised nation.

Eminent global health experts Dr Zulfiqar Bhutta and Dr Jai Das are co-editors of the newly launched book Climate Change and Water-Related Challenges in Pakistan: Tangible Solutions. Its 12 chapters examine how climate stressors are “undermining freshwater resources, public health systems and livelihoods across Pakistan”. A copy of the book should be provided to every lawmaker, policy wonk and politician in Pakistan; it should be required reading in schools and universities. We cannot be educated enough about this battle.

In the August 2025 landslide and deadly flooding in Chitral and Gilgit-Baltistan, local shepherds alerted disaster management authorities of the coming floods, according to forestry and biodiversity professional Ajaz Ahmad. The government’s planned early warning system for natural disasters will only succeed if it incorporates community-based indigenous knowledge. In fact, Dr Das argues that the wealth of ancestral wisdom in our rural communities should be a major part of the struggle against climate change in Pakistan.

We can’t be educated enough about the climate battle.

Climate change disproportionately affects the vulnerable — women, children and the elderly, who are least able to defend themselves from heat or natural disaster. The 2022 floods in Sindh and Balochistan displaced 600,000 pregnant women in the region; many fled to higher ground and camped on floodbanks in the open, deprived of any meaningful antenatal or postnatal care. Women suffered sexual violence in relief camps; in some areas women were not allowed to leave their homes because of security. They gave birth to children in dark, damaged homes filled knee-deep with contaminated floodwater.

Besides the threat to life and livelihood borne by entire populations, women were deprived of sexual and reproductive health services, subjected to increased amounts of domestic violence. A survey in Dadu showed that three years after the floods, 25pc of the women surveyed were still ill with anxiety and depression. Yet in a small pilot-tested community intervention outlined in Das and Bhutta’s book, Lady Health Workers created support groups and spaces where flood-affected women could talk among their friends and peers, express their frustrations. The result: a measurable decline in mild-to-moderate depression among the women in the study.

Building climate-resilient health syst­e­­ms is the battle fought also by Dr Meh­reen Mujtaba, associate professor in the department of climate change at the Health Ser­vices Academy in Islamabad. In 2014, she presented a case study from Pakistan on gender-focused adaptation at the WHO Glo­bal Climate and Health Summit in Brazil. With the help of Pathfinder Inter­national, the government trained Climate Cha­mpions in Pakistan, female community leaders who would act as first responders in times of natural disaster and rai­se awareness in more normal times. In Sindh and KP, about 750-800 girl stude­nts and wom­en, fluent in local langu­a­ges, taught local peo­-ple about safe nutrition, disease prevention, and helped women find access to safe shelters and safe deliveries.

As previous director of Climate Change and Health in the Ministry of Health, Dr Mujtaba spearheaded a series of climate risk and vulnerability assessments across Pakistan. These pointed out our vulnerabilities in agriculture, water resources, and health and proved that the climate crisis is already here. Dr Mujtaba is currently helping to draft a national health adaptation plan which will be used to seek global funding for adaptation and mitigation of climate crises.

Ultimately, stakeholders working at the district level and the communities will be instrumental in ensuring our children have a future.

According to Dr Mujtaba, “the takeaway is one of hope and optimism” — but only if the larger issue of climate change becomes, in the words of Dr Bhutta, as politically central as “roti, kapra aur makan”.

The writer currently teaches Expository Writing at AKUFAS.

Published in Dawn, December 16th, 2025