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AS Pakistan navigates intense climate vulnerability, the federal budget for FY26-27 allocates Rs2.478 billion to the Ministry of Climate Change and Environmental Coordination under the Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP). While this allocation signals a policy acknowledgement of environmental threats, an objective examination reveals a disconnect between financial inputs and tangible outcomes. By analysing funding lines (afforestation, capacity building and urban strategies) against realities on the ground, we can evaluate whether these public funds serve genuine ecological preservation or merely fuel profit loops.
The centrepiece of the ministry’s portfolio is the ‘Upscaling Green Pakistan Programme’, consuming Rs2.335bn (over 94 per cent of the budget). On paper, massive tree plantation drives are laudable. However, evaluating this expenditure requires looking beyond the number of saplings planted to assess the broader ecosystem.
Pakistan suffers from one of the highest rates of deforestation in Asia, driven by timber mafias, unregulated urban sprawl and agricultural conversion. While the government spends billions planting fragile saplings, mature forests which possess superior carbon sequestration capacities, established root systems for flood mitigation and rich biodiversity are cut down at alarming rates. A sapling takes decades to replicate the ecological services of a single mature tree. By failing to halt deforestation, the state is effectively emptying a sinking boat with a thimble.
Without strict survival-rate audits, afforestation drives risk becoming cyclical commercial operations where dead saplings are repeatedly replaced using public funds, benefiting commercial interest groups while yielding negligible long-term ecological returns.
Federal spending on climate action has generally declined.
The remaining budget lines follow a similar pattern of administrative expenditure outstripping concrete outcomes. The ‘Green Skills for Sustainable Development’ initiative, allocated Rs51.6 million, aims to train youth for eco-friendly jobs. However, without a structural shift in Pakistan’s economy to create green industries, training programmes remain isolated workshops. The output becomes a certified but underemployed cohort, turning the allocation into a public relations metric rather than an economic transformation tool.
Similarly, Rs50m is earmarked for the ‘Formulation of the National Urban Strategy and Guidelines’ to prevent urban flooding. Pakistan already possesses an abundance of policy documents, frameworks and strategy papers. Funding yet another guideline document while municipalities lack basic financial resources to upgrade drainage systems, stop wetland encroachment or enforce building codes is an analytical failure.
Given the country’s repeated exposure to floods, droughts, heatwaves, and glacial hazards, the budget remains small compared to the scale of climate risks. For strengthening coping capacity, it will be important that future budgets place greater emphasis on adaptation and resilience alongside mitigation and tree-planting initiatives.
A review of the climate change ministry’s PSDP allocations over the past five years shows that despite growing climate risks and stronger international commitments, federal development spending on climate action has generally declined in real terms.
Inflation in Pakistan has remained elevated during much of the period from 2022 to 2026. Even if the ministry’s budget had remained constant, its purchasing power would have declined. Instead, the nomi-nal PSDP allocation itself has fallen from Rs9.6bn in FY 2022-23 to Rs2.48bn in FY 2026-27. In real terms, therefore, federal climate development spending appears to have contracted sig-nificantly.
The federal ministry’s allocation remains an important signal of national priorities, and a declining PSDP trend suggests that climate governance is increasingly expected to rely on external finance and cross-sectoral spending rather than a growing dedicated federal climate budget.
From the perspective of climate governance, the budget is heavily weighted towards an ecosystem with comparatively limited resources dedicated to adaptation planning, climate resilience infrastructure, early warning systems and climate risk management.
For a country with growing risks, transparency is essential to determine whether its climate budget is genuinely mitigating a national emergency, or simply operating as a subsidised mechanism for elite enrichment. True climate resilience is not built on unverified metrics but proven by an outcome-based financial model. This will require us to shift to independent public audits, open-data monitoring and decentralised accountability.
The writer is a climate policy analyst.
Published in Dawn, June 28th, 2026
