Pakistan’s Climate Disconnect

In mid-March 2022, Innovate Educate & Inspire Pakistan (IEI), a nonprofit organization that works to make high-quality education accessible in the rural northeastern Gilgit Baltistan region, launched the country’s first-ever climate education program for teachers. The region is particularly vulnerable to climate change due to rapidly melting glaciers, and locals have struggled to find economically viable ways to adapt.

Seven educators from across the country took part in the program, which equipped them with the resources to teach children from sixth to eighth grade about climate change and climate action in their schools by translating materials into local languages and engaging in play-based activities. The program was the first of its kind in a country that would months later be reeling from a summer of deadly super floods.

Those floods were one reason that state parties to last year’s United Nations climate change conference in Egypt, known as COP27, approved the creation of a loss and damage fund. Though rich countries had for decades shunned the prospect, Pakistan and other vulnerable countries in the global south helped move climate reparations into the mainstream conversation.

But while there has been a lot of conversation about the loss and damage victory, there has not been enough about what comes next for the global south. Islamabad’s newfound leverage at U.N. climate negotiations does not automatically translate to local-level mobilization. This is partially because much of the discourse of the global climate movement remains inaccessible to the average Pakistani, who has limited media access and is not fluent in English. “We’ve done so little work on developing Urdu as a language over the years, and so we don’t have vocabulary to understand all these new terms that are developing,” said IEI founder Marvi Soomro.

The disconnect between the Pakistani leadership and public has left the country extremely vulnerable to climate change, as effective climate action requires everyday citizens to be invested and involved. Small-scale initiatives such as IEI are an attempt to bridge this gap. “This program is aimed to do two things, understanding the issue and finding solutions to innovate locally,” Soomro told Foreign Policy.

Indigenous Pakistani knowledge on the environment is rich and goes back generations. When working with a rural community in southern Punjab province, Zainab Naeem, who researches climate-related policy at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) in Islamabad, said, “[Community members] told me how they know disaster is coming. If ants are coming down from a tree, it’s fine, but if ants are going up, a storm is coming.” Beyond weather patterns, Indigenous Pakistani culture has long promoted lifestyles that are harmonious with nature such as seasonal diets, subsistence farming, and using natural fertilizer.

But these traditions—which in the Western press are often accompanied by dehumanizing images of impoverished dark-skinned women holding clay pots on their heads—don’t mesh with the global north’s climate change narrative, where media is focused on fast fashion and plastic straws, not to mention more general attempts to avoid responsibility and reparations for the effects of climate change in the global south.

Though many Pakistanis acknowledge the reality of climate change, they don’t see it as important, said climate policy researcher Dawar Butt. “With the floods, [climate change] has become a main concern, but other issues like groundwater depletion, fossil fuels usage are all slow onset, and so 80 to 90 percent of the population care a lot more about their basic necessities—making sure there’s food on their plate,” he told Foreign Policy.

Language is another barrier. Most climate discourse in Pakistan is only available in English and not in local regional languages such as Sindhi, Punjabi, or Balochi—or even in Urdu, the country’s national language. Climate activist Rida Rashid—who is working on a digital platform to address these issues such as by translating English content to Urdu—said that creating accessible content is key to involving local communities in adaptation efforts. “People do know what is happening, but they don’t know this is the climate crisis and they don’t know who’s responsible. Even in urban centers, there’s a lot of lack of awareness and education,” she said.

“The [Pakistani] media prioritizes sensational politics … [and] does not prioritize climate change,” Naeem told Foreign Policy. “Awareness needs to be a bottom-up approach. Capacity-building needs to happen at a local, rural, village-council level, and media should support that,” she added.

Ameem Lutfi, a professor of history and anthropology at Lahore University of Management Sciences, is working to correct this by creating an organization that builds bridges between the climate policymaking and research spheres and those affected by climate change on the ground.

His new group, the Action Research Network (ARN), which he co-founded with cancer biologist and researcher Nousheen Zaidi, plans to focus on capacity-building in low-income communities by helping them understand climate change and build the resources they need to mitigate and adapt to it on a local level.

The ARN has started by conducting initial surveys of the impact of climate change on low-income areas. The organization has also gathered a group of 15 Punjabi schools to hold seminars on how some of the most immediate effects of climate change will impact individuals. These classroom sessions will culminate in a joint science fair where students present their own solutions to local climate problems and meet academics. At a previous summer school in a neighborhood affected by climate change, locals were also empowered to develop their own solutions to climate change. It made them feel more involved with decision-making and policy discourse.

Additionally, the ARN wants to make sure the people suffering the most from climate change are informed about their rights and obligations as citizens—such as their right to clean water and living environments—as well as their ability to protest the deprivation thereof.

“More important [than academic conferences] is the people directly impacted and making sure they are directly involved in these conversations,” Lutfi told Foreign Policy.

The ARN is part of a growing group of small-scale efforts to make climate discourse—and therefore climate action—more accessible to Pakistanis. They hope to get vulnerable Indigenous communities directly involved in the climate justice movement. Though these initiatives remain local—and are not stewarded by a larger authority—they show that climate accessibility is not an impossibility.

Along with IEI, the Gilgit Baltistan region is also home to climate activist Pervez Aly, who represented Pakistan’s youth at COP27. Aly has long worked to engage local communities in climate conversations through protests and community organizing. He runs an informal program that focuses on getting local communities talking about climate policy and their role in shaping climate action.

“We are speaking to them [local leaders] using religious teaching such as Hadith [the prophet’s sayings] or however we can engage people,” Aly told Foreign Policy.

Aly is also working to introduce climate education in the curriculum of local government schools across the country. But the bureaucratic red tape involved has made this a long and sometimes frustrating process. So he has started on a local level at schools in Gilgit’s capital until he gets permission from the federal education and climate change ministries to take his syllabus to a broader audience. One day, Aly hopes to connect climate leaders across Asia to build a mass climate movement.

IEI and Haqooq-e-Khalq, a progressive leftist political party, have focused on local-level engagement for similar reasons. By starting small, these organizations can sometimes magnify their impact. The seven teachers who took part in IEI were able to reach seven different schools and 428 students, who became familiar with climate science and began developing their own individual mitigation projects. Students experimented with models to insulate their homes and build micro biogas plants, which create fuel from organic waste like food.

“If you have teachers who are leading this movement, you have thousands of schools across the country,” Soomro said. “It’s happening on a grassroots level.”