Climate Vulnerability.

On Wednesday, Senate Chairman Senator Raza Rabbani urged the government to discuss the possibility of writing-off Pakistan's loans during the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres' scheduled visit to Islamabad. This is already a popular sentiment on social media platforms these days with a lot of people demanding reparations for countries in the Global South that are most vulnerable to climate change despite minimally contributing to the causes behind it.

Mr Rabbani argued that in the past for political reasons, imperialist powers have written off loans for certain counties. Therefore, on humanitarian grounds, Pakistan certainly has a case and its pending loans with the IMF and the World Bank should be waived.

This may seem like a bold proposal to push at the official level, but the fact of the matter is that there is an alarming amount of convergence between debt vulnerability and climate-change vulnerability in the developing world. The least developed countries in the world have contributed less than 8 percent of greenhouse gas emissions since 1850 but stand at the highest risk of climate change. Not only are these countries across Asia and Africa geographically positioned to suffer the worst...