WHILE the United States continues to dismantle the international climate architecture it once helped build, wars from Ukraine to the Middle East are generating unaccounted emissions, consuming the fiscal space that wealthy nations pledged to climate finance, and returning fossil fuels to the centre of global strategy.

Meanwhile, 2024 was the first calendar year to go above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial level; the critical 1.5°C threshold. The tipping points have arrived. What climate models warned would happen by 2080 is happening already.

At the receiving end stands Pakistan, a country that caused less than 1 per cent of the problem and is living with an outsized share of the consequences.

Its glaciers are melting. Its monsoon no longer arrives on schedule, bringing, instead, either punishing drought or catastrophic flood. Its rivers are caught between a warming mountain range above, and hostile neighbours below.

This is not a collection of separate crises. It is one crisis, with many faces, bearing down on us. And time is running out.

In January this year, the United States withdrew from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the foundational 1992 treaty ratified by the Senate by a vote of 92-0 and upheld by every administration since. It simultaneously withdrew from the Paris Agreement, the IPCC, and the Green Climate Fund.

No country had ever done this before.

The decision was taken in a world already destabilised by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, by a Nato rearmament that has absorbed the fiscal space European governments once directed at climate finance, and by a Gulf energy crisis that has returned fossil fuels to the centre of global strategic thinking.

The Trump administration’s fossil fuel revival and Europe’s sharp turn towards defence spending reflect the same underlying judgment: that security, defined narrowly, takes precedence over survival defined broadly and over time.

Developed countries are choosing to strengthen themselves in the short term at the cost of planetary health and their economies at the cost of the ecosystems that underpin them.

Pakistan did not make this judgment, but it is living with its consequences.

The diversion from climate finance to military spending has dwarfed commitments made at global forums. Pakistan is getting what it does not deserve, stresses Ali Tauqeer Sheikh

The wars generating political realignment are also generating emissions that dwarf the reductions governments have pledged.

The Ukraine war has produced an estimated 230 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent over three years.

The first 15 months of Israel’s war on Gaza generated at least 31 million tonnes. Global military spending reached a record $2.7 trillion in 2024.

Treated as a country, the military sector would rank fourth in the world by emissions, accountable to no climate framework and invisible in every NDC submitted to the UNFCCC.

Military emissions remain exempt from Paris Agreement reporting, a loophole never closed.

The $300 billion climate finance pledge of COP29 is being dismantled by the same governments that signed it.

The UK cut real-terms climate finance by roughly 50pc to fund defence spending.

Germany and several other EU countries have made equivalent choices.

The US has cut international climate finance to zero, and is actively working to dismantle both its own domestic climate commitments and the global agreements it once helped build.

Closer to home, Pakistan’s military standoff with India in May 2025 distracted focus from the regional climate agenda at the precise moment NDC 3.0 implementation needed to be consolidated.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has exposed how shallow the global energy transition remains beneath its headline numbers.

When the Strait closed, the response of major Asian economies was to scramble for alternative fossil fuel supply, reactivate mothballed coal plants, and sign emergency LNG contracts at premium prices.

India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and the Philippines increased coal-burn during the crisis. Japan and South Korea extended the operational life of coal and gas plants they had pledged to retire. Across Asia, coal is not a relic of the past.

It is the backstop that governments reach for the moment energy security is threatened, and the Hormuz closure was a reminder of how quickly that moment can arrive.

The IEA had projected fossil fuel demand peaking before 2030. The Hormuz crisis, arriving on top of the Ukraine war, has put that projection in a serious doubt.

For Pakistan, which had begun to reduce its LNG import exposure through grassroots solar revolution, the lesson is both cautionary and instructive: the energy transition is real, but it is fragile, and every geopolitical shock tests whether governments have the institutional resolve to stay the course, or the political instinct to retreat to the fuel they know.

The grand ambitions of successive COPs, from the $100 billion promise of Copenhagen to the 1.5°C target of Paris and to the $300 billion pledge of Baku, today look like agreements made in a different world.

Belem in November 2025 left the Loss and Damage Fund critically underfunded and substituted voluntary initiatives for binding ones.

Meanwhile the same governments that signed these pledges are spending that record $2.7 trillion annually on military hardware and cutting their climate finance budgets to fund it.

Multiplied across the EU and the US, the cumulative diversion from climate finance to military spending dwarfs every commitment made at every COP since Copenhagen.

The bill for that choice is being paid by Pakistan and countries across the Global South — absorbing, year after year, the consequences of decisions made in capitals far from their own.

Global targets have slipped

The Paris Agreement is failing.

In 2024, the global average surface temperature reached 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels, the first calendar year to breach the Paris threshold.

The three-year period ending in 2025 averaged above 1.5°C. Atmospheric CO2 is at its highest in two million years. The UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2025 finds that even full NDC implementation would deliver 2.3-2.5°C by 2100.

Current policies track 2.6-3.1°C. The US withdrew from the IPCC at a time when this verdict was being written.

Ecosystems are tipping

Tipping points are activating now.

Warm-water coral reefs have crossed their thermal threshold, with direct consequences for the fish stocks and coastal protection on which hundreds of millions of people in South Asia depend.

Greenland is losing 30 million tonnes of ice per hour.

The Atlantic circulation system (AMOC) that drives the South Asian monsoon is destabilising; its weakening would fundamentally alter the rainfall patterns on which Pakistan, India and Bangladesh have built their agricultural systems over centuries, reducing monsoon intensity in some zones while intensifying it unpredictably in others.

In the Hindu Kush-Himalaya-Karakoram region, glaciers are retreating faster than the global average, draining the rivers that provide freshwater to nearly a billion people across the region.

Along South Asia’s coastlines, the Arabian Sea is warming faster than the global ocean average, intensifying cyclone energy and driving saltwater intrusion into the agricultural land and freshwater aquifers of coastal Sindh and Balochistan as well as Bangladesh’s delta regions.

These systems interact: each one that tips accelerates the others.

The AMOC features in 45pc of all modelled tipping point cascade interactions.

What begins in Greenland arrives, in time, in the Indus Delta.

Pakistan pays the bill

Pakistan’s glaciers are retreating, simultaneously triggering glacial lake outburst floods in the north today and, over the longer term, threatening the dry-season river flows on which 80pc of irrigated agriculture depends.

Floods today, water scarcity tomorrow: two faces of the same crisis.

The monsoon, once the organising rhythm of Pakistan’s agricultural calendar, has become erratic and violent — arriving in concentrated, devastating bursts or failing to arrive at all.

The 2022 floods affected 33 million people and caused $30 billion in losses. Recurrent flooding in 2025 confirmed that nothing structural has changed.

Prolonged droughts in Balochistan and Sindh are driving displacement and deepening cross-border water tensions with Afghanistan and India.

The 1991 Apportionment Accord governs a river system that climate change has fundamentally altered.

The coastline is retreating under accelerating sea-level rise, storm surge, and saltwater intrusion.

Mangroves that once absorbed the majority of cyclone energy along the Karachi coast have been cleared.

The Indus Delta has contracted severely. Per capita water availability has fallen from 5,260 cubic metres in 1951 to approximately 1,000 cubic metres today, placing Pakistan at the threshold of absolute water scarcity.

Four crises — political rupture, military displacement of the climate agenda, accelerating warming and ecological collapse — are not parallel phenomena. They are one system of causation, activating the tipping points.

Pakistan absorbs the consequences of decisions made elsewhere.

Time is running out — faster than the models predicted, in a political environment more hostile than any since the UNFCCC was founded, for a country that did nothing to deserve what is arriving.

The writer represents Pakistan on the International Board of Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage.