Pakistan faces an unusual problem in the global context of climate change since it contributes to the smallest amount of greenhouse gas emissions, while at the same time being one of the states that is vulnerable to climate disasters. It becomes clear from the 2022 floods that affected about one-third of the territory. Because of the high level of vulnerability, the issue of climate resilience has become key for the government, instead of being a marginal question. Therefore, there are two projects that can be compared despite their differing logic.
Launched in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province in 2014, the Billion Tree Tsunami is a government-driven afforestation project that managed to plant trees across 350,000 hectares of forests and degraded lands and exceeded its target well ahead of time by August 2017. Moreover, it earned a reputation of exemplary reforestation success and was praised as such by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The Ten Billion Tree Tsunami Program, a more ambitious project at the federal level that was launched nationwide in September 2018, entailed even greater expenditure amounting to more than 125 billion rupees during its pilot period until 2023. The technique used in it includes not only planting but also assisting natural regeneration and preservation of degraded lands for natural restoration of their root system and seed bank without relying solely on planting new saplings. Moreover, being one of the countries in which many people depend on natural resources for their income, it has become an employment tool providing thousands of temporary forestry jobs. Nevertheless, some studies have shown that the advantages from it were not shared equally, and marginal communities as well as landless herders sometimes did not receive those profits that more stable landowners did.
In contrast, renewable energy development is in an entirely new scenario characterized by the fact that its driving force has been market dynamics and not policy planning. The adoption of renewables has grown significantly because of rising prices of electricity generated on the grid, which skyrocketed after 2021, as well as global surplus of solar panels manufactured in China. For instance, Pakistan temporarily held the position of the largest importer of Chinese solar panels when it imported approximately 45 gig watts worth of solar panel capacity within the last four to five years, which is equivalent to the capacity of its grid network. By April 2025, the net metered rooftop solar capacity had grown ten-fold in two years to around 5.3 gig watts, and it was expected that the contribution of solar power would account for more than 25% of total electricity production in that year. Given that the target set by the government is 60% of power production from renewables by 2030, renewables are expected to supply around 50% of the power generation mix of Pakistan by mid-2026.
This shows that Pakistan has become more resilient to climate change on two distinct trajectories: the first being the government-planned efforts while the latter being efforts from individual households in response to price changes. While both have their limitation, the overall trend suggests that there is concrete evidence of adaptation taking place.
