Nobody negotiated Pakistan’s energy transition. Facing unbearable electricity tariffs, millions of households, shopkeepers and farmers simply bought solar panels.
Imports that stood below one gigawatt in 2018 passed 50 gigawatts by early 2026. By April, roughly a quarter of Pakistani households were generating some of their own power, and the country had avoided an estimated $12 billion in oil and gas imports, a cushion that proved its worth when this year’s Hormuz crisis rattled energy markets.
COP31 opens on November 9 billed as the summit of implementation; the test is whether governments can match the urgency their citizens have already shown.
The science leaves little room. The UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report, published on October 21, finds that current policies put the world on course for about 2.8C of warming, and that full delivery of the new national pledges would still leave it near 2.6C. The window to avoid overshooting 1.5C has closed. Holding the overshoot to 1.7–1.8C would require emissions to fall 45% below 2025 levels by 2035, barely two election cycles away.
That makes fossil fuels unavoidable, which is why their absence from Antalya’s agenda is so striking. At COP28 in Dubai, countries agreed for the first time to transition away from them in energy systems. In Belem, efforts to turn that sentence into a roadmap were blocked, and fossil fuels disappeared from the final decision. Now the COP31 presidency’s Action Agenda, with ten themes and about 50 sub-priorities, does not name coal, oil or gas at all. Brazil’s voluntary roadmap is due in Antalya, yet only 18 governments, plus the EU and two negotiating blocs, contributed to it.
The presidency argues that its flagship target, raising electricity to 35% of final energy demand by 2035, will reduce fossil fuel use on its own. Electrification matters, but its value depends on what generates the power; met with coal and gas, it delivers far less than it promises. Pakistan knows the cost of lock-in: we are still paying capacity charges, in dollars, for fossil-fuel plants that now sit underused because citizens found something cheaper. Antalya must give Brazil’s roadmap a formal place in the negotiations and require every party to show how its national plan honours the Dubai commitment.
After the 2022 floods caused more than $30 billion in damage and losses, nearly 90% of the $10 billion pledged in Geneva came as project loans. That model must end. The UNEP puts developing countries’ adaptation needs at $310–365 billion a year by 2035; international public adaptation finance was $26 billion in 2023, and Belem’s promise to triple it by 2035 still falls far short. Adaptation and loss-and-damage support must come predominantly as grants, the Loss and Damage Fund must begin disbursing at scale and no country should be pushed deeper into debt to recover from a crisis it did not cause.
Antalya’s agenda offers a concrete path forward. The presidency has placed climate-resilient cities and food and water security among its ten priorities, and has launched an urban resilience financing facility with the World Bank and UN-Habitat. For Pakistan, where Karachi and Lahore swing between deadly heat and flooded streets, and where farmers can face drought and deluge in the same year, these are the right priorities. The test is whether such facilities reach municipalities and farming districts within years, not decades.
Accountability must run both ways, and I say this as a legislator from a recipient country. Pakistan has struggled to absorb even the finance already on offer, partly because international funds require accredited institutions we have been slow to build, and partly because climate responsibilities sit with the provinces while access to funds is concentrated in Islamabad. Our selection as a pilot country for the presidency’s Climate Implementation Bridge tests our own systems, not just donors’ generosity.
This is where parliaments come in. I propose a simple standard: every commitment made at a COP, and every dollar of climate finance given or received, should be reported annually to national parliaments and tracked from pledge to disbursement to outcome. Was it a grant or a loan? What was built? Did it protect anyone when the next flood came?
The same logic applies to who sits at the table, and here I speak as someone who has long argued that climate policy is gender policy. Women are not a vulnerable group to be acknowledged in the last paragraph of a communiqué. When disaster strikes, they manage water, food and family survival, and they are often the first to lose income, healthcare and their daughters’ schooling. Their knowledge is essential to effective adaptation.
Yet at COP30, women made up 40% of party delegates and led only a third of delegations. The Belem Gender Action Plan, which runs to 2034, must be funded and implemented, and every climate finance proposal should show how it reaches women directly. Success should be judged by whether women reached safe shelter, whether girls returned to school after the floods and whether women farmers kept their land and livelihoods.
The world is late, but late is not hopeless. Pakistan’s rooftops show that people move quickly when the incentives are right and the benefits are visible. Antalya’s task is to make governments move the same way. Its success rests on plain questions. Were past commitments kept? Did the money reach those who needed it? Did emissions begin to fall? And were women in the room when decisions were made?
After thirty-one COPs, the question is no longer what the world will promise. It is what the world will finally deliver.
The writer is a member of the National Assembly. She holds a PhD in Law, and serves on the National Assembly’s Special Committee on Kashmir.
Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed in this piece are the writer’s own and don’t necessarily reflect Geo.tv’s editorial policy.
Originally published in The News
