Pakistan needs a miracle to rebuild after 2022’s devastating floods. Specifically, we need capital to fund that miracle. The government’s Resilient Recovery, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Framework (4RF) requires USD 16.2 billion to operationalize: Shehbaz Sharif has asked for USD 8 billion from the international community at the “International Conference on Climate Resilient Pakistan” at Geneva in January 2023. But the road to recovery is not free from hurdles. And the greatest hurdle in accessing international funding may be Pakistan’s egregious institutional reputation.

From 2008-2013, Transparency International estimated that USD 94 billion were ‘lost’ by the Pakistani coalition government due to corruption. Mismanagement of public assets – like Pakistan Steel Mills and Pakistan Railways – has cost the country PKR 104 billion and PKR 40 billion respectively. Inflated government spending, padded by salaries given to redundant officers and an over-investment in defense, adds fuel to a fire we cannot afford to feed anymore. It is no wonder that current IMF negotiations on continuing a bailout are contingent on financial transparency, accountability and evidence of impact-based planning from Pakistan. The greater the suspicion with which the world regards us, the slower that climate finance will reach us at a time when we need it most. What can Pakistan do to pay back its trust deficit, and avail the funding it needs?

The key to regaining trust lies in seeing the faults of our current systems with eyes wide open. The first fault is infrequent reporting on current climate projects and financial opacity. The Pakistan Ministry of Climate Change website reads like a last-minute college project with no citations. Of the four projects listed by the Ministry as ongoing under the Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP), none have reports attached or financial justifications, even though some budgets exceed PKR 100 billion. For the projects that have a short summary attached, the written content showcases project objectives without action descriptions or impact assessments. For all the public knows, the PKR 56 million budgeted for the PSDP Climate Resilient Settlement Unit were simply used to publish 12 lines on the website. This opacity in climate projects is unacceptable if we are to request international funding for flood recovery.

The second fault is in the design of climate projects themselves. Innovations in climate initiatives remain confined to the heavily publicized tree plantation drive. While forest cover and carbon sequestration are essential for climate resilience, trees are hardly a one stop solution to climate change, especially not when the nation remains haunted by Karachi’s eucalyptus tree debacle. Despite the cliche, Imran Khan’s Ten Billion Tree Tsunami Project (TBTTP) seemed promising, but efforts are receding in the wake of political instability: a natural consequence of linking projects to politicians. Additional defects in project planning include the lack of SMART indicators. Any target set for a project must be specific, measurable, action-based, realistic and time-bound. In the absence of SMART indicators, projects tend to boast grand claims of achieving solutions that are often circular. The lack of measurable impact from climate projects will diminish the financial faith placed in them on an international landscape.

For Pakistan to pay back its trust deficit and avail climate finance at scale, our government needs to not only ensure reporting and itemize budgets on climate projects, but also create impact-oriented objectives to report on. These reports must be easily available for public scrutiny. We can either put in effort to produce transparent reports now, or hang our heads in regret a decade later as climate projects lay unfinished and underfunded.