Pakistan submitted an updated Nationally Determined Contribution in September 2025, committing to cut projected 2035 greenhouse gas emissions by 50% against a business-as-usual baseline of 2,559 MtCO₂e, 17 percentage points through Pakistan's own resources and policy and the remaining 33 points conditional on international climate finance. The same pledge targets clean sources reaching roughly 62–69% of installed electricity capacity by 2035, and estimates the total investment needed through 2035 at US$565.7 billion.
Environment and climate resilience is one of the five priority pillars in Uraan Pakistan, the federal government's 2024–29 National Economic Transformation Plan tracked on PIVRA's Economy & Livelihoods page, placing climate targets under the same quarterly national KPI reviews as export growth and energy reform rather than treating them as a separate track.
The federal government's main reforestation vehicle, the Green Pakistan Programme, reports having raised, regenerated, or distributed roughly 2.3 billion plants across about 0.7 million hectares as of March 2026, the government's primary response to the forest and tree-cover loss driving several of the challenges below.
The 2025 floods alone caused Rs 822 billion in damage and affected 6.5 million people across 70 districts, in a year that was also the second-warmest on record in 65 years. This is climate volatility, not a one-off event, and it keeps recurring on a multi-year cycle rather than a generational one.
Pakistan was ranked the world's most polluted country in 2025, with average PM2.5 levels 13 times the WHO guideline. World Bank data shows this has stayed roughly flat, never once approaching the guideline, for over a decade, even as the electricity mix has gotten cleaner.
Of Pakistan's 50-percentage-point NDC 3.0 emissions target, 33 points, roughly two-thirds of the total ambition, are explicitly conditional on international climate finance that has not yet been committed. Delivery of the headline target depends on money the country does not currently have.
Assesses the Pakistan Stock Exchange's new homegrown ESG benchmark index, its methodology, and the self-reported disclosure gap that will decide whether it can be trusted as regulation begins to depend on it, the same measurement and accountability question that shadows Pakistan's climate pledges.
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