The climate change crisis can no longer be treated as a standalone environmental problem, Senator Sherry Rehman said in Islamabad on Monday, describing it as a multi-layered challenge that now overlaps with artificial intelligence, energy security and geopolitical instability. Speaking at an event on “Strengthening Climate Action” held by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), the former federal minister for climate change called for a fundamental overhaul of climate priorities.
Why the Climate Change Crisis Demands Integrated Strategies
Senator Rehman stressed that modern ecological realities require integrated strategies rather than isolated interventions. She said the world was entering an age of unprecedented disruption, and that countries must move beyond fragmented responses and rethink how they approach development, technology and resource security.
Central to her argument was the idea that climate change is no longer the only strand of the polycrisis, the term widely used to describe several overlapping global emergencies. In her view, it now intersects with nearly every other pressure facing societies. She nonetheless cautioned against surrendering to a narrative of doom and gloom, arguing that the right response is a rethinking of priorities rather than resignation.
Warming Projections and the Cost to Pakistan
Referring to the UNEP Emissions Gap Report, Senator Rehman said its findings should serve as a wake-up call. Under current policies, the world is heading towards roughly 2.8 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, she noted, while full implementation of existing national climate pledges would still leave the planet at around 2.6 degrees Celsius.
She said Pakistan is already experiencing the consequences of this widening gap between ambition and reality. According to the senator, the country remains trapped in a recurring cycle of disasters and recovery, with progressively less time to rebuild between shocks. Recalling the 2022 floods, when one-third of the country was submerged, she said Pakistan’s cumulative climate-related losses over the past three decades were estimated at $59 billion, citing the State Bank of Pakistan.
She also drew on figures from international institutions. The Asian Development Bank estimates that Pakistan loses more than $2 billion annually to extreme weather events, she said, while the World Bank put agricultural crop losses from the 2025 floods at approximately $1 billion. Taken together, these numbers illustrate why the climate change crisis is viewed in Pakistan as an economic and developmental emergency as much as an environmental one.
Climate Justice and the Burden on Vulnerable Countries
A significant portion of the address concerned climate justice. Senator Rehman argued that the concept cannot be reduced to asking vulnerable countries to devise their own solutions while the global economic system continues to reward high emissions. She pointed to fossil-fuel subsidies, which the International Monetary Fund has estimated at approximately $7 trillion.
Pakistan, she said, is paying for a crisis it contributed very little to creating. She added that as global wealth grows, so does the number of people who are poor, hungry, land-deprived and water-deprived, and she warned that the effects of these inequities do not stay within national borders. “We do not live in a moral vacuum,” she said.
Artificial Intelligence and the Environment
Describing the present period as an axial age of transformation, Senator Rehman said artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing how humanity functions, consumes resources and exercises power. She cautioned that AI should not be understood merely as a digital tool, since it depends on an enormous physical infrastructure that carries significant environmental implications.
That observation links the technology debate directly to the climate change crisis. The energy and resources required to sustain large-scale computing, she suggested, add a new dimension to questions of energy security and resource use that policymakers have yet to address fully.
A Call to Reset Climate Priorities
The senator’s remarks reflect a broader shift in how climate policy is discussed, from a narrow focus on emissions towards a wider examination of how technology, geopolitics and inequality shape environmental outcomes. For a country that has endured repeated flooding and mounting losses, her message was that piecemeal measures will not suffice and that the response must be as interconnected as the problems themselves.
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