Introduction
Pakistan occupies a paradoxical position in global climate discourse, repeatedly being invoked as a frontline state of climate harm. Yet, its 250 million inhabitants enjoy almost none of the institutional, participatory, or accountability infrastructures that the language of climate vulnerability would seem to demand. In 2022, Pakistan ranked number one, as the country most affected by extreme weathers. This was the same year of the catastrophic Indus floods that submerged roughly one-third of the country, displaced more than 33 million people, and produced an estimated $30 billion in damages (Adil et al., Climate Risk Index 2025: Who Suffers Most from Extreme Weather Events?). However, the 2026 Climate Risk Index, shows that Pakistan moved from the top one position, to being among the top 20 countries most affected by extreme weather events (Adil et al., Climate Risk Index 2026: Who Suffers Most from Extreme Weather Events?). While this may seem like good progress, it also showcases how we are one catastrophe away from being ranked number one, yet again.Time and again, we have seen these figures circulate freely in international fora, being used for diplomatic appeals at Conferences, and being recited in landmark constitutional judgments. The issue, however, lies in the fact that the people who are most affected by these catastrophes, whose homes are washed away in Sindh and Balochistan, possess no enforceable mechanism through which to demand adaptation funding, no procedural right to participate in disaster planning, and no avenue through which to hold federal or provincial agencies legally accountable for the implementation failures that compounded the disaster.
Therefore, through this paper, I aim to examine the disconnect between Pakistan’s extreme climate vulnerability and the limited legal protections available to communities who bear the brunt of climate harm. The dominant framing of Pakistan’s climate predicament, both within domestic policy discourse and in international scholarship, treats vulnerability as a problem of resources, infrastructure, or development. However, I argue instead, that vulnerability in Pakistan is fundamentally a problem of citizenship; of who is recognized by the legal order as a rights-bearing, participatory subject when climate harm occurs, and on what terms. Drawing on Andrew Dobson’s theory of ecological citizenship and James Holston’s account of insurgent citizenship, I introduce the concept of climate citizenship as the substantive condition under which vulnerable populations can demand accountability, participate in environmental decision-making, and exercise recognized claims against the state for climate harm.
My central argument is that Pakistan’s climate-related law and litigation acknowledge vulnerability, often eloquently, in the cadences of constitutional rights and international obligations, without producing the institutional or participatory conditions that would constitute climate citizenship in any meaningful sense. The result then, is symbolic climate constitutionalism: a body of declaratory jurisprudence and ratified commitments that performs recognition, while leaving the structural conditions of climate inequality untouched. By situating environmental governance within broader questions of citizenship, inequality, and state capacity, the paper aims to reframe climate vulnerability not as a development problem but as a question of legal and political belonging.
From Environmental Rights to Climate Citizenship
The literature on environmental and ecological citizenship offers a useful starting point for thinking about what is missing in Pakistan’s legal response to climate harm. Andrew Dobson argues that ecological citizenship cannot be fully articulated through the inherited liberal or civic-republican traditions; it requires a post-cosmopolitan framework in which obligations are owed non-reciprocally by those who occupy unsustainable amounts of ecological space to those who occupy too little (Dobson 89). For Dobson, environmental citizenship is centrally about participation in the co-creation of sustainability policy, premised on a substantive conception of fairness in the distribution of environmental goods. The implication is that environmental citizenship is not a status conferred by law but a practice enabled by legal and political institutions; a capacity to act, claim, and participate.
This emphasis on participation and recognition resonates with David Schlosberg’s argument that environmental justice cannot be reduced to distribution. Schlosberg insists that justice involves recognition of group identity, the development of capabilities for flourishing, and inclusion in political decision-making, all of which are interdependent (Schlosberg 12–20). A regime that distributes compensation to flood victims while excluding them from decisions about embankment construction, urban zoning, or adaptation finance fails the test of environmental justice even if the material distribution is generous. Schlosberg’s account is significant in the Pakistani context because it shows how a legal order can recognize vulnerability rhetorically while denying recognition in the procedural and political senses that matter most to vulnerable communities themselves.
However, the dominant scholarship on environmental citizenship has been criticized for its origins in Global North contexts of relatively functional democratic institutions. To this, James Holston provides a corrective. Working from the urban peripheries of São Paulo, Holston shows that postcolonial states often practice what he calls “differentiated citizenship”: a citizenship regime that is universally inclusive in formal national membership but “massively inegalitarian in distribution” (7). Formal citizenship coexists with hierarchies of access, enforcement, and recognition that systematically marginalize the urban poor, the rural, the religious minorities, and the regionally peripheral. Holston’s framework is acutely relevant to Pakistan, where formal constitutional inclusion has long coexisted with deeply uneven access to legal remedy, public services, and political voice.
Furthermore, climate citizenship, has conventionally been defined as a duty that individuals need to fulfill in addressing climate change through personal daily actions and collective political engagement (2035 Legitimacy). However, the issue lies in the fact that citizens can continue to fulfill their duties on a daily basis, but that will not yield any results, until the state holds itself accountable as well. Therefore, I argue that climate citizenship needs to be expanded to be defined as the substantive legal and political condition through which a person affected by climate harm can be recognized as a rights-bearing subject, participate in decisions about adaptation and mitigation that affect their lives, and demand accountability when state institutions fail in their climate-related obligations. Climate citizenship, in its conventional sense, has three constitutive dimensions: rights (the legal acknowledgement of climate harm as a rights-violation, including procedural standing); duties (institutionalized channels through which affected communities shape adaptation, mitigation, and disaster response); and responsibility (functioning mechanisms through which state failure can be sanctioned) (Rizo). Where these dimensions are present in name but absent in practice, what remains is symbolic climate citizenship; a juridical performance that registers vulnerability without altering the political relationship between the climate-vulnerable and the state. Farhana Sultana captures this dynamic when she argues that climate justice scholarship must move beyond rhetorical recognition to engage with the “intersectional and international feminist scholarship” that situates climate harm within colonial legacies, racial capitalism, and the structural hierarchies that produce uneven vulnerability in the first place (Sultana, “Critical Climate Justice” 118–19). Hence, climate citizenship, I argue, is the legal-political analogue of this critical justice praxis.
Pakistan’s Climate Vulnerability: The Empirical Disjuncture
The empirical case for Pakistan’s vulnerability is overwhelming and increasingly familiar. Pakistan was ranked first among countries most affected by extreme weather in 2022, attributing the ranking to the unprecedented monsoon floods of that year (Adil et al., Climate Risk Index 2025: Who Suffers Most from Extreme Weather Events?). A peer-reviewed attribution study concluded that climate change had likely intensified the extreme monsoon rainfall that triggered the disaster, and that the resulting flooding fell disproportionately on “highly vulnerable communities” in Sindh and Balochistan (Otto et al.). Despite contributing less than one percent of cumulative global greenhouse-gas emissions, Pakistanis face a risk of dying from climate-related disasters approximately fifteen times higher than the global average (United Nations).
These macro-level figures, however, conceal a more troubling sociological reality. Climate harm in Pakistan is distributed along entrenched axes of inequality: gender, region, class, ethnicity, and rural-urban geography. Sultana’s earlier ethnographic work on hazardous waterscapes in South Asia demonstrated that women in flood-affected regions face compounded risks because of pre-existing constraints on mobility, property, and decision-making (Sultana, “Living in Hazardous Waterscapes: Gendered Vulnerabilities and Experiences of Floods and Disasters” 49). The 2022 floods reproduced and intensified these patterns: women in agriculture and livestock-based livelihoods bore disproportionate losses, while displacement increased their exposure to gender-based violence and to the secondary harms of insecure shelter. The provincial unevenness of vulnerability is equally stark. Sindh and Balochistan, which together accounted for the bulk of flood-related fatalities and displacement, have historically been peripheral to the country’s economic and political center in Punjab and the federal capital.
This empirical profile produces a vulnerability-citizenship disjuncture: a situation in which the people whose lives are most acutely shaped by climate harm have the weakest substantive access to the legal and political institutions through which climate harm could be addressed. The disjuncture is not incidental. It is the predictable outcome of a state architecture in which climate vulnerability tracks, and intensifies, pre-existing differentiations of citizenship. In the Pakistani context, those most affected by climate change are precisely those whose citizenship has always been most attenuated. This is the structural condition against which any analysis of Pakistan’s climate-related law must be read.
Constitutional Architecture: Rights Without Citizenship
Pakistan’s constitutional jurisprudence on environmental rights is, on its face, remarkably progressive. The Supreme Court’s 1994 decision in Shehla Zia v. WAPDA held that the right to life under Article 9 of the Constitution expanded to include the right to a clean and healthy environment, importing the precautionary principle from the 1992 Rio Declaration into Pakistani constitutional law (PLD 1994 SC 693). The case originated in a letter from four residents of Islamabad protesting the construction of an electromagnetic-field-emitting grid station in their neighborhood. The Court treated the letter as a public-interest petition under Article 184(3), which empowers the Supreme Court to act on its original jurisdiction in matters of fundamental rights of public importance, and read into Article 9 a substantive right to environmental protection. The judgment is widely credited with founding Pakistan’s environmental rights jurisprudence.
Two decades later, the Lahore High Court’s decision in Asghar Leghari v. Federation of Pakistan extended this jurisprudential trajectory to climate change. Leghari, a farmer-lawyer from southern Punjab, brought a public-interest action alleging that the federal and Punjab governments’ failure to implement the National Climate Change Policy of 2012 and its associated 2014-2030 Framework violated his fundamental rights to life and dignity under Articles 9 and 14 of the Constitution. In its September 2015 order, the Green Bench declared that climate change was a “defining challenge of our time” and a “clarion call for the protection of fundamental rights of the citizens of Pakistan, in particular, the vulnerable and weak segments of the society who are unable to approach this Court” (W.P. No. 25501/2015). The Court directed twenty ministries to nominate climate-change focal persons, ordered the production of a list of priority adaptation actions, and constituted a Climate Change Commission to monitor implementation. In its 2018 supplementary judgment, the Court reframed “environmental justice” as “climate justice”, defining the latter as a human-rights-centered approach that links development with the equitable distribution of climate burdens (PLD 2018 Lahore 364).
These judgments are routinely cited in international scholarship as exemplars of progressive Global South climate constitutionalism, and have also inspired further litigation in the country, including the 2016 petition by seven-year-old Rabab Ali against the federal government’s coal expansion plans for the Thar desert (Climate Litigation Database, “Ali v. Federation of Pakistan – Petition”), and the pending Maria Khan v. Federation of Pakistan before the Lahore High Court (Climate Litigation Database, “Maria Khan Et Al. v. Federation of Pakistan Et Al. – Order”). Furthermore, the ongoing climate change discussions helped influence the 2024 26th Constitutional Amendment of the country, which formalized this trajectory by inserting Article 9-A into the Constitution, expressly recognizing the right of every person to “a clean, healthy and sustainable environment” (Shaikh).
However, a closer reading of these ‘wins’ reveals the limits of this constitutional architecture from the perspective of climate citizenship. First, the cases that anchor Pakistan’s environmental rights jurisprudence have been brought predominantly by middle-class, urban, English-educated petitioners with access to elite legal counsel. Shehla Zia originated in Islamabad’s most affluent neighborhood; Leghari, though from a farmer-family, was a law student capable of pleading constitutional doctrine before the High Court. Furthermore, he brought the petition forward because his family’s 500-acre sugarcane farm suffered from water scarcity and temperature changes that were caused by climate change. The question then arises, had this not been a personal loss for him, would Leghari have ever brought the petition forward for the suffering communities of Balochistan and Sindh? However, even if we set the class-issue aside, the real issue lies in the fact that the then architecture of Article 184(3) (i.e. public-interest litigation) while formally open, presupposed capacities of legal articulation that are systematically distributed away from the Sindh and Balochistan flood victims who are nominally its beneficiaries. As Barritt and Sediti observe, the very feature that made Leghari globally celebrated, which is its rights-based framing, also embedded the case within a juridical idiom that the climate-vulnerable cannot easily speak (205-07).
Second, the 26th Amendment that introduced Article 9-A simultaneously curtailed the Supreme Court’s suo motu powers under Article 184(3), stating that “the court can only hear cases of public importance and fundamental rights, and no longer has the authority to make its own declaration.” As critics have noted, the same amendment that constitutionalized environmental rights weakened the principal procedural mechanism through which those rights had previously been activated (Shaikh). Furthermore, under the 27th Amendment, Article 184 was completely ommitted, thereby taking away all powers of the Supreme Court, and in return, creating a Federal Constitutional Court under Article 175 of the Constitution. This court henceforth, subordinates judicial review of fundamental rights to a body more closely aligned with the executive. The result is a jurisprudence that affirms vulnerability in increasingly emphatic terms while contracting the institutional space within which that affirmation can be enforced.
Third, the Court’s relief in these cases has been overwhelmingly directive and institutional rather than redistributive or participatory. The Climate Change Commission constituted in Leghari was composed of cabinet representatives, technical experts, and a small number of NGO representatives; it included no formal channels through which flood-affected communities, women’s collectives, or rural agricultural workers could participate in defining adaptation priorities. The Commission produced reports stating that sixty-six percent of the 242 priority actions in the Climate Framework had been implemented by January 2017; a figure that the Court accepted at face value despite the absence of any verification mechanism (PLD 2018 Lahore 364). What was institutionalized, in other words, was bureaucratic monitoring of policy paper, not climate citizenship.
Symbolic Litigation and the Performance of Climate Justice
Barritt and Sediti’s 2019 analysis of Leghari provides perhaps the most influential framing of the case as a symbolic precedent. They argue that the judgment’s primary significance lies not in its enforcement but in its expressive function: it articulates climate change as a justiciable rights matter and offers a template for Global South litigation (203-04). Symbolic adjudication can shape political imaginaries, embolden civil society, and produce reputational pressure on recalcitrant governments.
However, symbolic outcomes are not free of cost. They produce what might be called a recognition trap: the more eloquently the judiciary articulates climate harm as a rights violation, the more the political system can defer the work of building the institutional infrastructure that would make rights enforceable. The Climate Change Commission established in Leghari met twelve times between 2015 and 2018 and was thereafter reconstituted as a standing committee (ESCR-Net). However, by 2022, when the catastrophic floods arrived, the institutional capacity that Leghari had ostensibly produced was nowhere visible in the disaster response. This was visible in the lawmakers’ debate in Pakistan’s National Assembly when legislators across party lines called for the disbanding of the very disaster management authorities that the Court’s earlier orders had been intended to galvanize (Wasim).
However, time and again, we have seen this pattern recur across the climate-litigation portfolio. The Rabab Ali v. Federation of Pakistan petition, which was filed in 2016 against the development of the Thar coalfields, has produced no operative ruling almost a decade later. The Thar coal expansion has continued, supported by Chinese financing through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Moreover, the case of Maria Khan v. Federation of Pakistan, a 2019 petition before the Lahore High Court alleging that federal inaction on climate change violates the petitioners’ fundamental rights, still remains pending. An order was passed a day after the writ petition was submitted, ordering the respondents to submit their written statements within eleven days. However, seven years later, there has been no update on the case. The pattern suggests that Pakistani climate litigation operates increasingly as a rhetorical archive of vulnerability; a register of what has been said about climate harm, rather than as an instrument of structural redress.
The deeper problem is that the symbolic mode of climate litigation tends to bypass the question of who, exactly, is constituted as a climate citizen by these proceedings. When the Lahore High Court speaks in Leghari of “the vulnerable and weak segments of the society who are unable to approach this Court,” it does so in the third person. The vulnerable are the objects of judicial concern, not the subjects of legal action. They are recognized as victims but not constituted as agents. A legal regime that treats the vulnerable as objects of paternal protection produces a different political subject than one that treats them as participants in environmental decision-making (Dobson, Citizenship 68-69). The expressive content of Pakistani climate jurisprudence belongs to the former model. It produces a rhetoric of victimhood that is well-suited to international fora and the loss-and-damage discourse, but ill-suited to the construction of substantive climate citizenship at home.
Disaster Governance and Bureaucratic Fragmentation
The implementation gap that climate litigation has been unable to close is most visible in the architecture of disaster governance. Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), established under the National Disaster Management Ordinance of 2006 and codified in the National Disaster Management Act of 2010, was designed as the apex coordinating body for disaster response, with Provincial Disaster Management Authorities (PDMAs) and District Disaster Management Authorities (DDMAs) at the subsidiary tiers. On paper, this three-tiered structure aligns with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the international best practices for decentralized disaster governance.
However, in practice, the system has performed unevenly across successive disasters. A recent analysis identifies a recurring pattern: “despite the formulation of proactive laws and policies to promote disaster risk management in Pakistan, implementation is still largely reactive in form” (Hote and Koike 341). The authors document the absence of clarity in stakeholder roles, limited institutional capacity at the district level (where DDMAs are largely active only during the monsoon season), and a top-down operational logic that produces relief-focused rather than preparedness-oriented governance. This bureaucratic fragmentation is itself a citizenship issue. Where authority is unclear, accountability is impossible. Where accountability is impossible, communities cannot demand performance from the state, and the substantive content of climate rights is hollowed out.
The 2010 floods, which killed nearly two thousand people and affected twenty million more, exposed the NDMA’s coordination failures and triggered a cascade of reforms such as, the 2012 ten-year National Disaster Management Plan, the 2013 National Disaster Risk Reduction Policy, and the 2015 National Flood Protection Plan-IV. However, by 2022, these instruments had failed to translate into operational resilience. The Congressional Research Service noted that “following the 2010 floods, the government reportedly failed to implement plans that would have reduced the consequences of future floods by preventing rebuilding in, and repopulating of flood-prone areas” (Kronstadt and Margesson 2). The 2022 floods reproduced the same pattern of inadequate early warning, contested coordination between federal and provincial bodies, and reliance on ad hoc humanitarian appeals.
Therefore, the implications for climate citizenship are significant. It is in disaster planning that affected communities might exercise procedural rights such as, rights to information, consultation, and recourse. Pakistan’s NDMA architecture, however, contains almost no formal mechanisms for community participation in disaster planning or post-disaster needs assessment. The Damage and Needs Assessments produced after major disasters, including those for 2010 and 2022, have been government-led and donor-coordinated exercises in which affected populations appear as objects of measurement rather than as participants in defining what counts as adequate recovery (Asian Development Bank). The “Watan Card” cash-transfer scheme that followed the 2010 floods, while innovative, and widely distributed, was however, administratively designed and politically distributed, with documented failures of inclusion at the district level. The total number of Watan Cards distributed was just shy of a million. To help put that into perspective, 20 million Pakistanis were affected by the rains/floods in 2010 (Asian Development Bank).
The Implementation Gap and the Hollowing of International Commitments
Pakistan has been an active and visible participant in the international climate regime. It ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1994, the Kyoto Protocol in 2005, and the Paris Agreement in 2016. Its updated Nationally Determined Contribution, submitted in 2021, states a committment to a fifty percent reduction in projected emissions by 2030, “with 15% from the country’s own resources and 35% subject to provision of international grant finance that would require USD 101 billion just for energy transition” (Government of Pakistan 10). At COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Pakistan, which was chairing the G77 plus China negotiating bloc, played a central role in securing the historic agreement to establish a Loss and Damage Fund (Kamboh et al. 305).
However, the gap between Pakistan’s international commitments and its domestic legal capacity is structural. The Pakistan Climate Change Act of 2017, the principal statutory instrument designed to operationalize the country’s international obligations, has been described in legal commentary as a “tiger without teeth”; a framework law that establishes a Pakistan Climate Change Council and Authority, but lacks meaningful enforcement, prosecution, or sanction provisions (Kazmi). For seven years after its enactment, the Climate Change Authority was not even constituted; it was the threat of a Supreme Court petition that finally prompted the federal government to begin the appointment process (Kazmi). Critics have argued that the Act centralized climate governance at the federal level in a manner inconsistent with the 18th Constitutional Amendment, which devolved environmental matters to the provinces (Jamal 110). The result therefore, is that Pakistan’s most ambitious piece of climate legislation operates in tension with the constitutional architecture it was meant to implement.
This implementation gap is, again, a citizenship issue. International climate commitments and domestic framework laws have a performative function: they signal to international audiences that the state takes climate change seriously. But where these commitments are not translated into operational duties, accessible remedies, and participatory institutions, they constitute the legal infrastructure of symbolic climate citizenship. The vulnerable populations on whose behalf Pakistan negotiates at the COP have no domestic standing to enforce the commitments their government makes. Climate finance, when it flows, is channeled through donor-coordinated mechanisms that bypass the legal claims of affected communities. The Loss and Damage Fund, whose creation Pakistani diplomacy did so much to advance, is structured as an inter-state transfer mechanism with no provision for direct community access. The architecture reproduces, at the international scale, the same recognition-without-citizenship logic that operates at the domestic constitutional level.
Toward Substantive Climate Citizenship
If the diagnosis offered here is correct, then the dominant policy responses to Pakistan’s climate vulnerability i.e. more rights instruments, more framework laws, more international commitments, are at best insufficient and at worst actively counterproductive, in the sense that they may reinforce the recognition trap. The question that then arises is, what would substantive climate citizenship require?
First, there needs to be a procedural retooling of public-interest litigation, to lower the capacities required to access constitutional remedies, including legal aid for climate-related claims, the recognition of community plaintiffs, and the institutionalization of standing for affected populations rather than only for individual rights-holders. Second, there is a dire need for the embedding of formal participation rights in disaster governance, beginning with the NDMA’s needs-assessment processes and extending to the constitution of disaster risk reduction committees with mandatory community representation.
Third, climate citizenship requires accountability mechanisms that are operational rather than declaratory. The Climate Change Authority constituted under the 2017 Act must be empowered to receive complaints, conduct inspections, and impose sanctions on agencies that fail to meet adaptation benchmarks. Fourth, the implementation of Article 9-A should be accompanied by procedural rules that recognize the distinct legal needs of climate-vulnerable populations, including evidentiary presumptions in their favor, the recognition of climate harm as a continuing rather than discrete violation, and the integration of intergenerational equity as a justiciable standard.
These reforms, however, are not panaceas. They will not, in themselves, dismantle the structural inequalities that produce differentiated climate vulnerability. They would, however, begin to close the gap between the recognition of vulnerability and the constitution of climate citizenship, between the rhetorical inclusion of the climate-vulnerable in constitutional discourse, and their substantive inclusion in the institutions through which climate harm is governed.
Conclusion
Pakistan’s climate predicament is not principally a development problem. It is a problem of citizenship and legal belonging. The country’s constitutional jurisprudence, climate legislation, and international diplomacy have produced an extensive vocabulary of vulnerability; a legal idiom in which Pakistan’s status as a frontline state of climate harm is repeatedly affirmed. But the vocabulary has not generated institutions through which the climate-vulnerable can act as legal subjects. Recognition has been substituted for participation; declaration has been substituted for accountability. The result is a regime of symbolic climate constitutionalism that performs justice without delivering it.
The concept of climate citizenship developed in this paper is intended as both a diagnostic tool and a normative horizon. It names what is missing in Pakistan’s climate-related law and offers a framework for evaluating reform proposals against the criteria of recognition, participation, and accountability. The frame may also have wider application across the Global South, where the gap between climate vulnerability and substantive legal protection is the rule rather than the exception. As the international climate regime continues to expand its rhetoric of justice and loss-and-damage, the scholarly task is to insist that these commitments are evaluated not by their declaratory content but by the quality of citizenship they produce for the populations they purport to serve. Climate vulnerability without climate citizenship is not climate justice. It is its mirror image.
Works Cited:
2035 Legitimacy. “Climate Citizenship.” 2035Legitimacy, https://2035legitimacy.fi/climate-citizenship/. Accessed 4 May 2026.
Adil, Lina, et al. Climate Risk Index 2025: Who Suffers Most from Extreme Weather Events? Edited by Adam Goulston, GermanWatch, 12 Feb. 2025, https://www.germanwatch.org/sites/default/files/2025-02/Climate%20Risk%20Index%202025.pdf.
———. Climate Risk Index 2026: Who Suffers Most from Extreme Weather Events? . Edited by Adam Goulston, GermanWatch, Nov. 2025, https://www.germanwatch.org/sites/default/files/2025-11/CRI%2026%20full%20report.pdf.
Asian Development Bank. Flood Emergency Reconstruction Project: Pakistan Floods 2010: Preliminary Damage and Needs Assessment. 2010, https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/linked-documents/44372-01-pak-oth-02.pdf.
Barritt, Emily, and Boitumelo Sediti. “The Symbolic Value of Leghari v Federation of Pakistan: Climate Change Adjudication in the Global South.” King’s Law Journal, vol. 30, no. 2, May 2019, pp. 203–10, https://doi.org/10.1080/09615768.2019.1648370.
Climate Litigation Database. “Ali v Federation of Pakistan – Petition.” Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Columbia Law School, https://www.climatecasechart.com/documents/ali-v-federation-of-pakistan-petition_c85c. Accessed 4 May 2026.
———. “Maria Khan Et Al. V Federation of Pakistan Et Al. – Order.” Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Columbia Law School, https://www.climatecasechart.com/documents/maria-khan-et-al-v-federation-of-pakistan-et-al-order_1521. Accessed 4 May 2026.
Dobson, Andrew. Citizenship and the Environment. OUP Oxford, 2003.
ESCR-Net. “Leghari Vs. Federation of Pakistan.” ESCR-Net, 30 Jan. 2023, https://www.escr-net.org/caselaw/2023/leghari-vs-federation-pakistan/.
Government of Pakistan. Updated Nationally Determined Contributions 2021.
Holston, James. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. . Princeton University Press, 2007.
Hote, Hassan Haren, and Toshio Koike. “Addressing Foundational Issues for Effective Flood Risk Governance in Pakistan.” Water Policy, vol. 27, no. 3, Feb. 2025, pp. 334–54, https://doi.org/10.2166/wp.2025.236.
Jamal, Sarim. “Examining the Pakistan Climate Change Act 2017 in the Context of the Contemporary International Legal Regime.” LUMS Law Journal, vol. 5, 2018, pp. 108–16.
Kamboh, Shafiq Ahmad, et al. “Articulating a Loss and Damage Fund: How the Global South Is Rethinking Agency and Justice in an Age of Climate Disasters.” Environmental Communication, vol. 18, no. 3, Mar. 2024, pp. 302–21, https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2024.2327058.
Kazmi, Hasnain Ibrahim. “Pakistan Climate Change Act — Challenges.” Tribune, 30 June 2024, https://tribune.com.pk/story/2475219/pakistan-climate-change-act-challenges.
Kronstadt, K. Alan, and Rhoda Margesson. “Pakistan’s 2022 Floods and Implications for U.S. Interests.” Library of Congress, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12211.
Leghari, Asghar, v. Federation of Pakistan. W.P. No. 25501/2015, Order Sheet, 4 Sept. 2015 and 14 Sept. 2015 (Lahore High Court Green Bench); PLD 2018 Lahore 364.
Pakistan, Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. 1973, as amended through the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, 2024. Articles 9, 9-A, 14, 184(3).
Pakistan, Government of. Pakistan Climate Change Act, 2017. Act No. XXXIV of 2017.
Otto, Friederike E L, et al. “Climate Change Increased Extreme Monsoon Rainfall, Flooding Highly Vulnerable Communities in Pakistan.” Environmental Research: Climate, vol. 2, no. 2, Mar. 2023, p. 025001, https://doi.org/10.1088/2752-5295/acbfd5.
Rizo, Kejsi. “From Rights to Responsibilities: The Role of Citizens in Climate Governance.” Social Sciences in Times of Change: Human Rights Facing Contemporary Challenges, Akademia Nauk Stosowanych WSGE im. A. De Gasperi w Józefowie, 2025, pp. 486–509, https://doi.org/10.13166/awsge/210730.
Schlosberg, David. Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Shaikh, Noorulain. “Article 9A of the Constitution of Pakistan: A Step in the Right Direction.” Paradigm Shift, 1 Nov. 2024, https://www.paradigmshift.com.pk/article-9a-constitution/.
Shehla Zia and Others v. WAPDA. PLD 1994 SC 693, Supreme Court of Pakistan, 12 Feb. 1994.
Sultana, Farhana. “Critical Climate Justice.” The Geographical Journal, vol. 188, no. 1, Nov. 2021, pp. 118–24, https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12417.
———. “Living in Hazardous Waterscapes: Gendered Vulnerabilities and Experiences of Floods and Disasters.” Environmental Hazards, vol. 9, no. 1, Jan. 2010, pp. 43–53, https://doi.org/10.3763/ehaz.2010.si02.
United Nations. “Pakistan Floods a ‘Litmus Test’ for Climate Justice Says Guterres.” UN News, 27 Sept. 2023, https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/09/1141587.
Wasim, Amir. “Lawmakers Assail NDMA ‘Failures,’ Seek Role in Flood Relief Efforts.” Dawn, 14 Oct. 2022, https://www.dawn.com/news/1714964.
