Rising the Heat, Declining the Productivity

Pakistan is one of the countries in the world facing the wrath of climate change every year in the form of disasters, disturbed weather patterns, and extreme heat strokes. Once again, it is recorded to be the second-warmest year in 65 years. According to the Economic Survey 2025-26, the national annual mean temperature in 2025 reached 23.9°C, which is 1.09°C above the long-term average of 22.8°C. On its own, these numbers are deciding and carving how people of this country will live and work. This excessive and rising heat is not just warmth but a gesture of hellfire in which Pakistan is burning for other countries' vices.

This key unfairness is that Pakistan has barely contributed to the problem it is now living through. The country contributes to evident for less than 1% of global emissions today and just 0.4% historically. But still it continues to rank among the most climate-vulnerable nations in the world. This gap between responsibility and consequence is not new, but each hot year makes it harder to live through and ignore. The country's annual mean temperature has already climbed by about 0.5°C, and projections suggest a 3 to 5°C rise by the end of the century if nothing changes globally. That trajectory is not some far-off scenario. It is already visible in the numbers coming out of this year alone.

The clearest evidence of this shift is already affecting the north, where the glaciers of Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are retreating, and the water bodies they feed are shrinking. These glaciers are not just a single concern; in reality, they feed the Indus system that much of the country's agriculture, hydropower, and drinking water depends on. As they retreat, rainfall patterns downstream become harder to predict too, swinging between prolonged dry spells and sudden, intense flooding within the same year.

It is this same unpredictability, along with rising heat, that is starting to show up in something more immediate: human health. Prolonged heat exposure doesn't just make people uncomfortable, it causes real damage to the human body, especially for those who cannot escape it. Heatstroke, dehydration, and cardiovascular stress rise sharply during extreme heat events, and Pakistan has already recorded deaths in Jamshoro tied directly to heatwaves. But the deeper story is in who bears this burden. It is disproportionately the poor, and specifically outdoor laborers, construction workers, farmers, and street vendors, who have no option but to keep working through the hottest hours of the day because their income depends on it. They cannot afford air conditioning, and many cannot afford to lose a day's wage either, so they keep working in conditions that are actively damaging their health and draining their energy.

These people burning in Pakistan are its human capital. When workers are pushed to labor through extreme heat, their productivity drops, their risk of illness and injury rises, and, over time, their capacity to work consistently declines. This is not just a personal health issue, it becomes a human capital issue for the country as a whole. A workforce that is chronically exposed to heat stress is a workforce that produces less, misses more workdays, and faces higher long-term health costs, and in an economy like Pakistan's, where a large share of labor is informal and unprotected, there is no safety net absorbing that loss. It falls directly on the individual and, in aggregate, on the economy.

Layered on top of all this is El Niño, a natural climate pattern where sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific warm periodically and disrupt weather systems worldwide. El Niño years tend to push global temperatures higher, and Pakistan is not shielded from that effect. When a naturally recurring warming cycle overlaps with a steady, human-driven warming trend that is already underway, the two compound each other. Hot years are becoming more frequent, and the recovery window requires policy solutions, both for the land and for the people working on it.

Pakistan does have climate frameworks in place, including its National Climate Change Policy and its Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement, both of which name adaptation in water, agriculture, and health as priorities. But the distance between what these policies promise and what reaches a daily-wage worker standing in 45-degree heat is still wide. The Economic Survey's numbers are not just a record to note and move past. They signal the condition and the reality, showing how we are treating our people and how much priority they truly have.