CORRUPTION and elite capture are the hidden drivers amplifying Pakistan’s climate vulnerability. The country ranks near the top of both the corruption and climate risk indices — an overlap suggesting causation. Yet this critical nexus remains glaringly absent from the IMF’s Governance and Corruption Diagnostic Report. The omission is striking given the IMF’s own $1.4 billion investment in climate resilience through the Resilient and Sustainable Finance facility. Could systemic corruption lie at the root of Pakistan’s worsening climate exposure? Can the country build climate resilience without first confronting the governance failures that amplify environmental disasters? The GCDR has not addressed this urgent nexus between corruption and climate risk.
Fatal blind spots: Corruption in Pakistan drains up to 6.5 per cent of GDP annually, according to the GCDR. Meanwhile, climate disasters and their extended impacts are estimated by the World Bank and other sources to cost Pakistan about 9.5pc of GDP each year through direct damage and broader economic disruptions. Together, these shocks represent a combined annual economic loss exceeding 15pc of GDP, highlighting climate risk as a foundational, not secondary, threat to Pakistan’s economic stability.
The GCDR has glaring gaps in linking corruption to environmental and climate issues: while the opening chapters identify corruption as a development barrier and examine elite capture, they provide no detailed analysis connecting these practices to ecosystem degradation or climate vulnerability. Subsequent chapters on economic and institutional governance highlight regulatory capture in key resource sectors, yet do not explicitly link these failures to environmental degradation or climate shocks. Even sections on rule of law and accountability systems emphasise weak enforcement without addressing environmental law or climate-risk screening gaps.
The GCDR treats climate vulnerability as largely separate from corruption and fiscal analyses, never clarifying how Pakistan’s governance failures multiply climate costs. This separation obscures the causal mechanism: when 30-40pc of climate finance is diverted through corrupt practices, adaptation becomes maladaptation. The 2022 floods exposed this deadly equation: substandard embankments built through kickback-laden contracts failed catastrophically, transforming what hydrological models predicted as manageable flooding into a national displacement crisis affecting 33 million people. Investigation revealed that contractors had used substandard materials while billing for reinforced structures, with inspection reports falsified by complicit officials.
The IMF report sidesteps how governance rot directly manufactures climate catastrophe.
The IMF report provides a detailed multi-sectoral analysis of how institutional failures haemorrhage 6.5pc of GDP, yet critically sidesteps how governance rot directly manufactures climate catastrophe. Consider water allocation: elite-captured irrigation authorities divert flows to politically connected landowners growing water-intensive crops during droughts, leaving smallholder farmers with empty canals and forcing rural-urban migration. This isn’t just corruption. It is climate vulnerability engineered into resource governance, creating conditions where natural climate variability becomes social catastrophe.
The GCDR’s analysis examines regulatory capture in resource sectors, weak environmental law enforcement and accountability gaps but does not synthesise these failures into the compound climate impact. This approach prevents an integrated policy response: climate-resilient procurement standards that turn infrastructure risk assessments into corruption deterrents, rather than bureaucratic add-ons.
Corruption as climate multiplier: When viewed through a climate lens, each governance failure the IMF has documented is a compound climate risk. Corruption, defined as the illegal misuse of public office for private gain, differs from elite and state capture that is embedded in the political economy. Elite capture is a more complex phenomenon where powerful interest groups not only break the rules but also manipulate state structures to design policies, laws, rules and procedures, exemptions and waivers, subsidy and tax regimes that legally channel public resources for their private benefit.
This distinction matters for climate policy design. Technical anti-corruption fixes such as stronger audits, digital procurement systems and whistleblower protections fail if they ignore the unequal power dynamics that allow a narrow elite to steer the system away from climate resilience towards maladaptive development. Elite capture increases climate vulnerability through opaque land-use rules that permit construction on floodplains, unregulated water allocation favouring politically connected agricultural exporters, and fast-track infrastructure projects that bypass environmental standards. This makes climate maladaptation an official, legal outcome of economic activity that no corruption investigation can touch.
Despite prioritising public procurement reform within one year, the report fails to address over 1,000 stalled or ongoing public sector projects with a cumulative throw-forward of Rs8.5 trillion or so. An inordinately high percentage symbolises elite capture: for instance, the Reko Diq copper-gold project without adequate water security assessments in Balochistan’s water-scarce areas, motorways routed through ecologically sensitive zones to benefit connected developers, and coastal highways accelerating erosion and displacing fishing communities.
These projects don’t just waste resources, they also increase climate vulnerability while consuming the budgetary capacity for the next decade, creating locked-in maladaptation that reforms cannot easily reverse. Without confronting this legacy portfolio, improved procurement transparency cannot deliver climate-resilient infrastructure. The solution requires political economy mapping to identify which elite groups benefit from maladaptation.
Cost of inaction: Pakistan cannot build climate resilience without reforming corrupt institutions, yet it cannot delay climate adaptation while undertaking decade-long institutional reforms. This is not a sequencing problem; it is a simultaneity imperative. Every year spent ‘fixing governance first’ means a corrupted disaster response converts manageable floods into displacement crises, elite-captured water allocation intensifies droughts, and diverted climate finance ensures infrastructure fails at the next shock. A recent analysis projects that climate inaction will cost Pakistan $250bn by 2030 and $1.2tr by 2050.
The way forward requires abandoning false choices between governance reform and climate action. Pakistan needs climate-conditioned governance interventions. In Pakistan, governance failure is climate failure.
The writer is a climate change and sustainable development expert.
Published in Dawn, December 4th, 2025
