Bringing down the fences

t is that time of year, again, when the world gathers to debate climate ambition at yet another Conference of the Parties. The venue this time is Belém, in the Brazilian Amazon. The city has been in the news for reasons that contradict the very spirit of these negotiations. Earlier this year, headlines showed a four-lane highway being carved through protected forest to create faster access routes for summit delegates. It is a familiar pattern. Recent climate conferences have been hosted by autocratic states that silence climate activists at home, by oil-producing nations that quietly dilute text in negotiating rooms while professing ambition at the podium, and by countries that built their wealth on a century of emissions while offering lectures on restraint to everyone else.

As COP30 opened, indigenous peoples and civil society organisations gathered outside the restricted perimeter. They protested the barriers, both physical and political, that still prevent frontline communities from shaping decisions that directly affect them. Security checkpoints controlled movement. Delegates walked through the gates even as many of those already living the daily consequences of climate change remained on the other side. The exclusion was not incidental. It mirrored the architecture of global climate governance itself.

A week earlier, the UN Environment Programme had released the Emissions Gap Report (2025). It is yet another reminder that the Paris Climate Agreement remains aspirational at best. Even if every country fulfills its current pledges, the world is heading toward roughly 2.3 degree Celsius to 2.5 degree Celsius of warming by the end of this century. The report also confirms what vulnerable countries already know: that adaptation finance is far below what is required, and the shortfall will impact the countries that lack institutional readiness to protect their people.

Pakistan sits at the centre of this reality. And not because Pakistan is hit the hardest by climate change, but because, as veteran climate leader Ali Tauqeer Sheikh reminds us, Pakistan is least prepared.

Almost every global ranking of climate vulnerability places Pakistan near the top. The metrics combine exposure (heatwaves, floods, droughts, glacial melt) with readiness (institutions, planning, capacity and inclusivity). Pakistan’s exposure is geographical and environmental; its vulnerability is institutional. We are not unprepared because the country lacks ideas or policies. God knows we have many—too many, possibly. We are unprepared because most of those plans, prepared by consultants, never leave the ministries where they are drafted. The National Adaptation Plan (2023) called for a ‘whole of society’ approach while being developed behind closed doors with nary an input from the civil society.

Pakistan has 169 districts. They range from densely populated industrial belts to sparsely inhabited mountain valleys. Yet, every major climate plan to date has been designed in Islamabad and or a provincial capital as if the country were administratively flat and climatically uniform.

This is where adaptation and maladaptation converge. Maladaptation is what happens when adaptation initiatives or development projects are designed without involving communities who must live with the consequences. Pakistan has already experienced this many times over.

Consider, for example, The Left Bank Outfall Drain, intended to remove waterlogging and salinity, disrupted natural drainage and increased flood risk for communities downriver. Decisions were made at the headquarters and the people bearing the consequences had little influence. The outcome was not resilience but enhanced risk and redistributed harm. More recently, we have seen how highways intended to connect towns and cities curtailed the drainage of flood waters, drowning some of the communities they were meant to facilitate.

That is what COP30’s protests in Belém are about: people on the frontlines of climate change demanding a voice in decisions that shape their future.

The lesson we need to take away is not that development projects are unnecessary. It is that development without community input, local knowledge and collaboration is a recipe for disaster. Peer-reviewed research on community-based adaptation across developing countries is quite clear. Projects endure and are sustainable when communities are involved in identifying risks and designing interventions. When participation is absent or merely token, projects either fail or create new vulnerabilities. The evidence points to the smallest units of decision-making, village councils, neighbourhood committees, watershed or rangeland groups, as the most effective at monitoring changes and adjusting actions over time. In other words, resilience grows where authority and accountability are close to the impact.

Adaptation must therefore be multi-tiered and sequenced. While national level decision making can provide guardrails by setting up flexible policy frameworks, provinces translate those frameworks into technical support and handle larger trade-offs, such as where major infrastructure should go and how upstream-downstream risks will be managed. Districts serve as the integration layer, gathering local risk information, aggregating data and monitoring whether adaptation efforts are reducing vulnerability. The union council and village level is where adaptation actually becomes real, where communities identify priorities, test measures, adjust or abandon what fails, and build on what works.

A union council, not a ministry or a line department, is the frontline of resilience. Local communities know which embankment collapses first in the rains, which tubewell has turned saline and where livestock routes cross dried riverbeds. Solutions at this level do not start with GIS layers and consultants but lived experience. Adaptation begins with evidence that communities can generate themselves. We have at our disposal practical and low-cost techniques such as transect walks whereby residents walk a route across farms and settlements, observing where water flows, where salinity shows on the soil, where shade is needed and where a flood always cuts the road. Seasonal calendars map when heat peaks, when rains arrive, when livestock migrate. These activities produce data that can result in a basic one-page risk map that could serve as a starting point.

From that shared understanding, communities test small, seasonal pilots where interventions can be tried, measured and reversed (if needed). In Jacobabad, this may entail installing shaded rest areas and clay water coolers near brick kilns to protect workers during heatwaves. In Muzaffargarh, farmers might test raised vegetable beds to cope with fluctuating river flows. In Swat, micro-hydel plants can power early-warning sirens for flash floods. And in Hunza and Ghizer, where glacial lake outburst floods are a growing risk, communities can identify safe vertical evacuation routes and reinforce natural debris barriers using local material.

Each pilot can be assessed using three simple tests. First, equity: does the intervention reduce risk for the poorest households rather than shifting the burden onto them? Second, reversibility: can the measure be undone or modified within a season if it proves ineffective or harmful? Third, protecting the commons: does it safeguard shared resources such as groundwater, rangeland or river access?

These are basic principles that allow decision makers to screen projects and address risk in real time while accounting for ground realities.

Evidence from Bangladesh shows that union council-level disaster preparedness committees integrated into routine community life, through health workers and local schools, cut mortality during cyclones dramatically over time. In Ethiopia rangeland programmes have improved resilience because pastoral institutions led the process, not because a ministry designed better models. The Netherlands’ Room for the River Programme has succeeded because residents influenced where water would go and what land would look like afterward.

Yes, these are different contexts but the principle remains the same. Adaptation succeeds when decisions are all-encompassing and authority and accountability remain aligned with community needs.

Although Pakistan’s local government system remains largely ineffective, undermined by political interference, provincial delays and bureaucratic overreach, there are islands of success that we can build upon. For example, the Rural Support Programmes have successfully mobilised communities and women’s groups for years. Rather than creating new, isolated climate initiatives, adaptation can be seamlessly woven into existing development routines such as through the construction of heat-resilient schools, upgrade of tubewells with salinity safeguards and rehabilitation of roads with flood-resistant drainage. This approach leverages proven grassroots networks to build resilience and foster sustainability—words that have lost meaning due to their use in failed policies lining bookshelves in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi.

That is what COP30’s protests in Belém are about: people on the frontlines of climate change demanding a voice in decisions that shape their future. Resilience will not emerge from another national plan printed on glossy paper. It will emerge when the people who queue for tankers during heatwaves, or carry bricks for a living in 50-degree Celsius heat are involved in choosing how policies are made and how climate and development funds are spent. If we are to reduce vulnerability, it will have to be through a shift in power, not just policy.

The aspirations of the Paris Agreement will likely not be realised soon. As such, Pakistan can continue to rank among the most vulnerable countries each year, yearning for climate funds that will never materialise on the scale at which they are needed or it can reconfigure adaptation around its own communities. In Belém, indigenous communities stood outside the negotiation fence demanding access to decision-making. In Pakistan, millions stand outside the planning and governance fences. If adaptation is to succeed, those fences must come down.

The writer works at the intersection of climate, water, ecology and society. He can be reached at imranskhalidgmail.com.