While the world converges to celebrate the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on September 9–29, 2025, in New York, the slogan “Better Together: 80 Years and More for Peace, Development, and Human Rights” sounds truer than ever. In a world under siege by growing crises—endless wars in Gaza and Ukraine, bare-fingered shredding of artifical intelligence, and the relentless drumbeat of climate change—this conference is a test of the world and global cooperation. In these dangerous deliberations, Pakistan is not just a signer but a lesson in climatic injustice, a voice from the margins that must be heard, that demands reparations and redress.
The destructive consequences of global warming have been notorious long enough to everyone from scientists to activists to policymakers. But to countries like Pakistan, they are not forecasts but reality. At UNGA this year, the seriousness of Pakistan’s climate vulnerability has come under searing scrutiny. As multilateralist and sustainable rhymes echo in diplomatic halls, the common life of millions of Pakistanis is a different story—a story of complacent cost in lives, forfeited incomes, and short-circuited potential. The world’s greenhouse gas emissions from Pakistan are less than 1%.
It is, nonetheless, among the most exposed countries to the ravages of climate disasters. The 2022 floods were a bitter reminder of that reality. When a third of the country was inundated, 33 million livelihoods disrupted, entire communities ravaged, and the destruction totaled a whopping $30 billion. Bridges were reduced to rubble, crops destroyed, and the economy ground to a halt. That tragedy was not fresh—it was an enforcment. It was monsoon season again across the land in 2025, and the skies have shed still more devastation.
Over 800 have perished since June from flash floods and rain inundations, all of which climatologists resoundingly attribute to global warming. The weather pattern is no longer extraordinary but has become the new normal. Country village residents and slum city dwellers exist on the brink, waiting for each rainy season to deliver yet another flood, yet another round of devastation. The image gets darker still when one considers the consequences in the long term.
The geography of Pakistan is awe-inspiring and puts it squarely in the face of climatic disaster. With over 7,000 glaciers—more than anywhere else except the polar regions—Pakistan is experiencing melting glaciers at a record rate. Glaciers that once relied on to yield steady freshwater streams now float by undetected, threatening both disastrous flood and nefarious drought. Melting glaciers are not just an environmental problem—but one of survivability for Pakistan’s agriculture, food security, and existence. Besides glacial melt and flooding, Pakistan has experienced paralyzing heatwaves. Summer temperatures have risen over 50°C summer after summer and have taken the lives of rural and urban residents. Heat kills the populace without continuous access to healthcare, clean water, and AC. Poor families, elderly people, women, and children bear the brunt disproportionately. These are not unconnected events—one more case of a trend towards system failure precipitated by world complacency and inequity.
On the UNGA, Pakistani officials vociferously insisted that this is not an issue of national capacity or preparedness. This is an issue of world responsibility. The industrialized world—whose carbon record has driven the climate crisis for more than one hundred years—is now faced with the utilitarian and ethical responsibility of paying back its climate debt. Pakistan is not asking for charity—it is asking for justice. The request is for ambitious Agenda, properly funded global loss and damage regime, and climate adaptation, and constructing longer-term resilience in the most vulnerable countries. The Assembly’s self-professed “collective responsibility” spirit has to be than rhetoric. United Nations climate talks have been marked by delays, failed promises, and gesture politics. Establishing the Loss and Damage Fund at previous climate talks was in the right direction but underfunded and bogged down in bureaucracy. Pakistan’s experience validates that the warning is no longer hypothetical. The response has to be immediate, substantial, and sustained.
In addition, Pakistan’s climate emergency remind us sharply how peace, human rights, and development—the three pillars of UNGA this year—are integrally interconnected with environmental justice. Environmental justice precedes sustainable development. Climate action precedes durable peace. Global unity of all states is required to halt human rights being further undermined by the gravitations of inequality and environmental degradation.
Where the world fails, there can be no denying the reality of Pakistan. The future of multilateralism lies in its ability to denounce for the poorest and fix the structural imbalances that heighten their misery. Institutions like the UN take their mandate from their ability to protest—not by the rulers, but by those who have paid the cost of their failure.
This 80th UNGA can and should be an achiever milestone—it simply must be a watershed. The international community must listen to the voice of nations such as Pakistan, not on account of sympathies, but in response to a sense of global responsibility and moral imperatives. Time is not on our side, and words cannot stand in place of action. If “Better Together” vision is ever to be of any value, it begins with us acknowledging that we are not equal in that we are not all contributing equally to global warming but we need to become equal in the race against it.