We’re not in a weather emergency — we’re in a climate polycrisis: Sherry Rehman
Liaquat Ali
Islamabad: Chairperson of the Senate Standing Committee on Climate Change, Senator Sherry Rehman issued a grave and urgent call for collective climate action her keynote address at the National Conference titled “Pakistan’s Final Warning: Climate Calamity or Collective Action.”
With Pakistan now alarmingly ranked #1 on the Germanwatch’s Climate Risk Index 2025, Senator Rehman laid out five strategic actions the country must urgently adopt to confront what she termed a “cascading polycrisis.”
“We must end the cognitive disconnect between extreme weather emergencies and climate trends. This is crucial because it means linking symptom to responsibility. Without real commitment to understanding the crisis, no sustained action will follow any climate whiplash,” she said.
Despite unprecedented climate shocks — including the 2022 super floods, which left over 33 million Pakistanis affected, and rising heatwaves crossing 50°C, Senator Rehman observed a troubling silence in policy corridors.
“I see no alarm bells ringing anywhere in power corridors. No budgets are being recalibrated for coping better with crisis,” she noted. “Climate will continue to be called ‘Mausam’ or Weather, which is a symptom of climate change. These are not isolated natural disasters, they are interlinked systems failures.”
She stressed that public rhetoric must evolve into a lived experience of accountability and action.
“The sooner we accept that, the sooner soundbite jargon will translate into lived experience and action. It’s time to move beyond the obligatory token nod to innovative action roadmaps.”
Focusing on the magnitude of climate impacts, Senator Rehman stated:
“Scale is the enemy as well as the friend. Climate stress is high in both scale and impact for Pakistan. It already showed its muscle flex in 2022. Lessons learnt are being lost in transmission.”
She emphasized the need for comprehensive risk reduction measures, such as early warning systems, noting that the United Nations now recognizes these as a basic human right.
“Its destructive power is being felt across the board in a cascading polycrisis, making it hard for communities and actors to respond in time. Just look at Texas, USA — they couldn’t respond in scale to flash floods due to unfilled weather posts. Sounds familiar? The River Swat tragedy? The floods of 2022 when one-third of the country went under?”
Pakistan, she noted, is deeply underprepared for the scale of climate investment required:
“To meet the climate crisis head on, everything will have to be scaled up. Finance is just one part of it. And let’s be clear — it’s not coming in anywhere close to the quantum needed by frontline ecosystems like ours. Mobilising sustained commitment, not token statements, is the level of need.”
She also reminded the international community of their responsibilities:
“We must remember our external commitment to climate justice as much as our local responsibility.”
Senator Rehman was equally candid about Pakistan’s fragmented institutional response:
“Fragmented responses will no longer work. A whole-of-society approach is both urgent and necessary. This involves all tiers of government as well as businesses, schools, communities — and of course, the media. Either we break silos and act as response multipliers, or we prepare for systemic collapse across the country.”
Public-private partnerships, she emphasized, must be empowered.
“They will be critical in any larger response wheel — but they need enabling.”
Reiterating that climate response is not merely about policy but about national signalling, Senator Rehman spoke at length about the power of communications.
“Strategic climate communications are pivotal to any sustained country response. These include national, provincial and local signalling, which all of us need to generate.”
She pointed to the private sector as the critical missing link.
“The private sector is the missing link here in building a viable communications value chain. They need to collaborate with governments in an integrated institutional roadmap — across all sectors. At the micro level, all sustainability goals have to be restated at every intersection.”
“What is not smart is closing any meeting with a Business-as-Usual path forward on sustainability, climate and pollution goals. That’s a recipe for failure. We must communicate for outcome integrity — not for optics.”
On the final and most critical point of her address, Senator Rehman made a clear call to reprioritize water conservation as Pakistan’s number one climate action agenda.
“If there is ONE priority for collective climate action in Pakistan it has to be Water conservation. The water crisis means we have either too much water in the system and rivers at the wrong time, or too little when and where we need it, to sustain food security and livelihoods across the country. Storage is certainly one way forward but the era of cost-runover big dams is behind us. Other than large scale conservation, what is needed is low cost rain harvesting in every Union council. This includes households and big businesses.“
She referred to UN data identifying Pakistan as one of the most water-stressed countries, and pointed to the visibly degrading landscape.
Senator Rehman concluded her keynote with emphasis on water as a lifeline
“Look around you — Balochistan and Sindh are brown. Even the groundwater resources have shrunk, because of over extraction. Yet we all know that water is life, and that in current consumption patterns it is a finite resource; so we need to stop using it per capita at the high rate we are. But we also need to save our Indus lifeline from encroachment, pollution, and upper riparian predations.”
The bottom line is not complicated if we build the commitment and capacity to act collectively. There is now no middle ground between catastrophe and action. The choices are stark. “
