The discourse around climate change is often underlined with warnings of an impending doom of an unimaginable scale lying in wait for a complacent humanity — warnings that seem too foreboding and too apocalyptic to be true, thereby exacerbating the perilous level of inaction and denial around this most critical issue of our times. It needs to be stated unequivocally: climate change is real and the existential threat it poses to our planet is no exaggeration. Though the Earth’s climate has been naturally and constantly changing over time, the rate at which the planet’s average temperature has risen since the Industrial Revolution is alarming and this human-induced warming has thrown the natural fluctuations in temperature worryingly off-balance. The key contributor to this disquieting rise in the Earth’s temperature is the unnatural levels of ‘greenhouse gases’ — gases that trap the sun’s energy in the atmosphere — being emitted into the air due to burning of fossil fuels. This global warming has contributed to rising sea levels due to the rapid melting of mountain glaciers and retreat of polar ice sheets. The implications of this accelerated warming would be felt in the form of sweeping changes in food production processes (due to extinction of various plant and animal species) as well as human deaths on a mass scale due to floods, storms, heat waves and droughts. The length and breadth of this wave of destruction will encompass the entire globe as no place is safe from the ravages of incremental and sustained climate change. However, poor countries like Pakistan, with less than adequate methods of handling these various feared ‘natural’ disasters, will suffer more than the developed world. As the slogan of the worldwide protest movement so succinctly points out, there is no planet B. Urgent action is badly needed to prevent such untold damage from unfolding. It seems that this sense of urgency is finally being felt in the area where it most matters, i.e. the corridors of power across the globe. As such, world leaders and their entourage of negotiators of almost 200 countries have descended on Paris to attend a two week long summit on climate change where a consensus deal on how to curb greenhouse emissions is hoped to be reached. This will be the 21st such annual conference organized by the UN since 1992, when climate change first started to gain currency as a topic of critical importance. However, in Rio 1992 the concept of climate change was a mere abstraction and the science around it was disputed in many quarters. Two decades down the line, the science and mainstream acceptance of the climate change theory have solidified but there is no meaningful action to show for it. Two follow-up meetings, in Kyoto in 1997 and Copenhagen in 2009, had a lot of hype surrounding them but they became casualties of fierce disagreements and a distinct divide between the developed and underdeveloped halves of the world. Apart from the logistical nightmare of coming up with a foolproof way to keep track of emissions in individual countries, the main bone of contention was the perceived notion of ‘climate injustice’. Basically, the developing countries have long argued that the developed world became ‘developed’ precisely on the back of its industries and the resultant carbon emissions and now that the world was pushing for expensive green technology, the developing countries would suffer more than their developed counterparts and have their progress arrested. In other words, the developed countries created the problem but the less developed ones were being punished. The Paris Summit, after the failures of the past, is now being billed as the final hope and the last chance for action. The new approach taken is to have each country present its own ‘carbon budget’ and targets rather than top-down impositions on each country. This compromise between the scientifically recommended level of emissions cuts versus the political cost of cutting down on emissions is unlikely to appease climate change activists since despite landmark pledges by major countries to cut carbon emissions, the levels of greenhouse gases being emitted will remain unsafe. Despite these misgivings, if an internationally accepted cooperative ideal is reached at the end of these two weeks then it will be a major, foundational victory and will positively impact the crisis in years to come. Pakistan, squarely in the developing world camp, is sticking to the obfuscating victim rhetoric and trying to absolve itself of responsibility under the guise of development goals. However, water security and floods have already become a bane of the country’s people and we stand to lose the most from the encroaching threat of climate change and must be proactive. The safety of our future generations demands it.*