HOW can Pakistan overcome the credibility gap and attract international climate finance? Our economic managers failed to provide safe, profitable, and attractive opportunities to 1,700 potential investors in the country who, instead, decided to invest $12.5 billion in 23,000 residential properties in the UAE alone, according to the Dubai leaks. The leaks have shown the Pakistani investor’s fascination with the real estate sector.

No other sector has harmed Pakistan’s physical environment and the economy as much as real estate, and inversely, no other sector at this point offers a better entry point for economic growth, development, and climate action because of its backward and forward linkages with more than 40 industries. Our roadmap and seriousness to transform the sector for safe, resilient, and low-carbon human settlements through reforms can potentially serve as Pakistan’s equity to access international climate investments.

The FATF’s grey list and the IMF’s conditionalities both looked at Pakistan’s real estate sector in terms of money laundering, terror financing, and tax evasion. The issue is, however, far more complicated. Pakistan’s real estate sector has also cannibalised the country’s ecosystems, water bodies, and communal lands, resulting in the tragedy of the commons, which has only enhanced our vulnerability to climate disasters. Fertile lands that could promise food security and communal lands for grasses, shrubs and trees necessary for biodiversity and citizens’ health have been eaten up by housing societies. There will be 367 million Pakistanis in 2047, 100 years after independence, but human settlements are still growing horizontally, instead of vertically, to add to the........

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