Pakistan’s climate crisis is not an accident; it is the arithmetic of injustice. In 2022 the deluge drowned one-third of the country, displaced millions and inflicted losses that ran into tens of billions of dollars. In 2025 another brutal monsoon cycle again turned granaries into lakes and homes into refugee camps, with millions affected and hundreds dead. These are not abstract data points; they are the lived facts of a country that has contributed less than 1 per cent of global emissions yet pays a catastrophic price.
The 2010 floods affected nearly 20 million Pakistanis, destroyed roughly 1.6 million homes and about 2.2 million hectares of crops, and caused around 2000 deaths. The 2022 deluge was even larger: about 33 million people impacted, some 8 million displaced, roughly 1700 fatalities, and combined damages and economic losses of about $30 billion, according to World Bank and national assessments.
So it is grotesque and consequential that a leading world politician has chosen to trash the scientific consensus. In late September, President Donald Trump dismissed climate change as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” during a high-profile address to the United Nations, a dismissal that fuels the political cover for delay and defunding. Such rhetoric does not simply scandalize science; it shapes markets, sanctions policy and shrinks the political space for the urgent funding poor countries need.
Yet amid this cynical global backdrop, one strand of pragmatic, if imperfect, hope has emerged: carbon markets. Pakistan has moved quickly to translate its natural assets into climate finance. The federal government approved national Policy Guidelines for Trading in Carbon Markets in late 2024 to open both voluntary and Article 6 (Paris Agreement) pathways for credits and offsets. The aim is obvious: monetize climate stewardship to fund adaptation and protection.
Sindh’s Delta Blue Carbon, a massive mangrove restoration and blue-carbon project, is the poster child. Built as a public-private partnership, Delta Blue has rehabilitated tens of thousands of hectares of Indus delta wetlands and sold credits on voluntary markets. Official figures reported sales and revenues in the tens of millions of dollars, with Sindh’s early trades valued at roughly $22 to $50 million by different updates. Verra and other registries have documented the project’s methodology and scoring as a nature-based removals model.
The potential is real and sizeable. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has completed forest carbon mapping and identified projects that could yield substantial annual revenues; provincial officials estimate hundreds of millions of rupees in prospective receipts. The federal guidelines and recent Article 6 project approvals signal Islamabad’s intent to be “transaction-ready” and invite bilateral investors. Pakistan has recently courted partners such as Azerbaijan to invest in carbon projects.
When rivers rise, arguments about theory and intent matter little to the woman who has lost her crop, her home and the school for her children. If Pakistan is to weather the coming decades, carbon trading must become part of a clear, accountable strategy for survival, not an alibi for more delay. The choice is no longer abstract: it is whether we will spend revenues to protect people or use them to tidy accounting in faraway ledgers. The difference is the difference between life and loss.
But markets are not magic. Two interlocking risks must be confronted if carbon trading is to be more than a headline or a rent-seeking opportunity.
First, integrity. International reviews have repeatedly found that a large share of voluntary credits fail stringent quality tests; projects with weak baselines or questionable additionality have flooded markets, depressing prices and undermining climate outcomes. Pakistan cannot simply become a supplier of cheap credits if those credits do not represent real, permanent emissions reductions or if they displace local rights and resources. Safeguards, transparent MRV (monitoring, reporting and verification), and alignment with Article 6 accounting rules are essential.
Second, governance and equity. The carbon rents must reach the communities that steward mangroves, plant forests and protect watersheds. Provincial claims over revenue, bureaucratic fragmentation and weak benefit-sharing frameworks risk turning public goods into private profits. Local stakeholders, fishers, forest communities and small farmers must be given legal title, livelihood safeguards and a transparent share of returns. Civil-society reviews and national analyses have already flagged governance gaps in Pakistan’s readiness for markets; these warnings cannot be ignored.
That is not to dismiss the practical advantages. Well-designed carbon projects can finance mangrove restoration that buffers Karachi and Thatta from storm surges; they can help rehabilitate watersheds that reduce flash floods; and they can provide enduring income streams whereas donor grants come and go. But converting potential into protection requires hard choices: ring-fenced revenues for resilience, independent registries, intrusive audits, and legal instruments that prevent double counting or the siphoning off of credits to distant buyers while local vulnerabilities grow. Verra, world’s largest carbon credit registry and others provide templates, but Pakistan must customize and enforce them.
If the world’s powerful electors prefer denial, if they call warnings a “con job” and defund the mechanisms that would repair global inequities, then poor and climate-exposed states must become architects of their own resilience. That means converting carbon receipts into dyke systems, irrigation reform, flood-resilient seed banks, and early warning networks. It means embedding climate adaptation in fiscal policy rather than treating it as an external programme. Pakistan’s National Adaptation Plan and Climate Finance Strategy are necessary scaffolds, but they must be matched by provincial implementation, independent oversight and direct community finance.
The moral argument is simple: those who polluted the atmosphere bear responsibility to repair its harms. The political lesson is sharper: when the powerful summon denial, the vulnerable must not be left to wait for moral conversion. Pakistan’s carbon markets can and should be a tool for justice, not a means to replicate the old inequalities. Done well, they will convert coastal forests and mountain woodlands into resources for resilience. Done poorly, they will be another episode in which the world pays lip service while people drown.
When rivers rise, arguments about theory and intent matter little to the woman who has lost her crop, her home and the school for her children. If Pakistan is to weather the coming decades, carbon trading must become part of a clear, accountable strategy for survival, not an alibi for more delay. The choice is no longer abstract: it is whether we will spend revenues to protect people or use them to tidy accounting in faraway ledgers. The difference is the difference between life and loss.
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