Arnold Toynbee, one of the most influential historians of the 20th century, argued that civilisations do not decline simply because they face difficult circumstances. Instead, they decline when they lose the ability to respond creatively to new challenges.
According to his famous ‘challenge and response’ theory, societies rise when their leadership generates innovative solutions to emerging threats; however, they begin to weaken when ruling elites become rigid, preserve outdated systems and continue applying old solutions to fundamentally new problems.
Pakistan’s current environmental and climate governance crisis reflects this warning in many ways. The country is not suffering from a lack of evidence, scientific knowledge, or awareness about emerging risks. For decades, scientists, researchers and communities have highlighted the growing impacts of climate change, including extreme rainfall, floods, heatwaves, water insecurity, ecosystem degradation and increasing pressure on agriculture. Yet, despite repeated warnings, our governance response remains largely reactive, focusing on managing disasters after they occur rather than transforming the systems that create vulnerability. The challenge has changed, but the response has remained largely the same. Climate change has fundamentally altered the risk landscape for Pakistan. Now the country is no longer dealing with occasional environmental shocks; rather, it is facing a continuous and interconnected crisis where climate impacts are affecting economic stability, food security, public health, water availability and national development. However, many governance approaches continue to operate through frameworks designed for a period when climatic conditions were more predictable and environmental pressures were less intense.
The repeated cycle of floods provides one of the clearest examples of this institutional failure. Every major flood brings emergency declarations, relief operations, compensation announcements and rehabilitation plans. However, the deeper structural causes of flood vulnerability often remain inadequately addressed. The encroachments on floodplains, degradation of wetlands, poor drainage planning, unregulated urban expansion and loss of natural ecosystems continue to increase the severity of climate-induced disasters.
A flood is not created only by rainfall; it becomes a disaster when governance failures allow vulnerable systems to remain unchanged. Despite increasing climate risks, Pakistan continues to approach floods primarily as humanitarian emergencies rather than as failures of development planning. A creative climate response would require integrating ecological boundaries into land-use planning, restoring natural water retention systems, strengthening urban resilience and ensuring that infrastructure decisions are based on future climate projections rather than historical weather patterns.
The same challenge is visible in Pakistan’s heatwave response. Rising temperatures are increasingly affecting human health, labour productivity, agriculture and urban livability. Yet, heat governance often remains limited to issuing public advisories during extreme events. A more innovative approach would require redesigning cities through climate-sensitive planning, increasing green spaces, protecting vulnerable workers, enforcing building standards and integrating heat resilience into urban development policies.
Perhaps one of the most critical examples of outdated thinking lies within Pakistan’s agriculture and food security systems. Agriculture remains central to Pakistan’s economy, livelihoods and food security, but the sector is increasingly exposed to climate and water-related risks. For decades, agricultural development has promoted water-intensive cropping patterns in regions where water availability is becoming increasingly uncertain, especially now that India has held the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance. Similarly, crops requiring significant irrigation resources continue to be cultivated in areas where groundwater levels are declining, river flows are under stress and climate variability is increasing.
This challenge becomes even more significant in the context of transboundary water concerns and growing uncertainty around future water availability. Pakistan’s agriculture is heavily dependent on the Indus Basin, a shared ecological system that is already under pressure from climate change, glacier dynamics, changing precipitation patterns, and increasing demand. At a time when water security is becoming a strategic challenge, continuing with agricultural models that assume unlimited water availability. The inability to rethink agricultural systems demonstrates a broader governance challenge, Pakistan often attempts to manage future risks using assumptions from the past.
Toynbee’s theory also highlights the danger of leadership becoming disconnected from changing realities. Climate governance requires a new way of thinking where environmental issues are not treated as separate from economic planning, national security, fiscal policy and development priorities. Climate change is no longer an environmental concern alone but a challenge that influences migration, food systems, energy security, public health and economic resilience. Yet, decision-making processes often remain dominated by traditional approaches where short-term political and administrative priorities receive greater attention than long-term resilience building. As a result, policies frequently focus on visible interventions rather than transformative reforms.
The issue is not the absence of expertise because Pakistan has capable scientists, researchers, young professionals, universities, and institutions producing valuable knowledge. The challenge is the gap between knowledge generation and governance action. A society cannot successfully respond to a new challenge if it refuses to embrace new thinking.
Toynbee also spoke about the importance of ‘creative minorities’, individuals and institutions capable of generating innovative responses during periods of crisis. Pakistan’s climate future depends on whether it creates space for such voices and whether its institutions are willing to move beyond traditional approaches.
A climate-resilient Pakistan requires a different development philosophy. It requires recognising wetlands as natural infrastructure, forests as climate protection systems, waste as a resource for circular economic opportunities and adaptation as an essential investment rather than an external obligation. It requires understanding that climate resilience is not a separate environmental agenda but a foundation for economic survival.
The world is already moving towards innovative climate solutions, including nature-based solutions, anticipatory action, resilient infrastructure, circular economies and climate-informed planning. Pakistan cannot afford to remain trapped in a governance model where action begins only after disaster strikes.
Toynbee’s message was not that civilisations collapse because they face challenges, as challenges are inevitable. Civilisations decline when they lose the creativity, courage and institutional flexibility required to respond to those challenges. Pakistan’s climate crisis is therefore not only a crisis of rising temperatures, extreme weather, or water scarcity but a crisis of imagination. The defining question for Pakistan is whether it will continue repeating approaches designed for the past or develop the creativity required for an uncertain future. Pakistan needs to rethink climate and development as a governance problem and adapt accordingly; otherwise, a decaying society will rely on old, broken habits instead of a fresh response, leading to its collapse.
The writer is an environmental scientist and leads the ecological sustainability and circular economy programme at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), Islamabad.
