Climate Breakdown in Pakistan: (Post) Colonial Capitalism on the Global Periphery.

Amongst the most devastating extreme weather events in recent years, the 2022 Pakistan floods ostensibly triggered a new-found urgency to reduce emissions and redress other underlying causes of human-induced global warming. Yet multinational corporations and Western governments remain non-committal about shifting away from non-renewable energy, offering meaningful climate and debt financing, or substantively reducing emissions. Meanwhile, the modalities of capital accumulation in postcolonial contexts such as Pakistan are destroying already vulnerable ecosystems, even as they reinforce logics of expropriation and uneven development inherited from colonial times. As Pakistan experiences a demographic explosion and mainstream politics becomes increasingly reactionary, the imperative of posing an alternative hegemonic conception to the dominant development paradigm is ever more acute. This Commentary interrogates the meaning of climate justice so as to bring the global political economy into conversation with the demographic, environmental, and economic trends in the post-colony, with a specific focus on the 2022 floods in Pakistan. It is contended that the Pakistan case can be broadly extrapolated to postcolonial South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, regions that are home to the fastest growing young populations in the world, and also amongst the most vulnerable to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]