Rethinking Responsibility: Pakistan’s Flood Crisis and the ICJ’s 2025 Advisory Opinion
The International Court of Justice’s 2025 advisory opinion regarding climate change does not resolve the climate crisis. What it offers Pakistan is something more precise: a legal vocabulary that understands the injustices it lives through. Behind every submerged house and broken embankment is a deeper question: who is responsible for protecting the planet, and what obligations do states have when their choices place entire nations at risk? By reframing climate devastation as a matter of responsibility rather than misfortune, the Court shifts the discussion from humanitarian response to legal obligation. For Pakistan, one of the world’s lowest emitters and most flood-vulnerable states, this reframing carries profound consequences.
The advisory opinion was issued in August 2025 in response to a request from the United Nations General Assembly seeking clarification on states’ obligations under international law in relation to climate change. Although advisory opinions are not binding judgments, they carry significant interpretive authority by articulating how existing legal principles apply to emerging global challenges. In this opinion, the Court examined long-standing doctrines of international environmental and human rights law, including the no-harm rule, duties of due diligence, and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. Rather than creating new law, the Court clarified how these duties operate in a contemporary climate context where harm is scientifically foreseeable and widely documented.
Pakistan’s recent flood seasons illustrate why this clarification matters. In the summer of 2022, one-third of Pakistan slipped beneath the water. The aftermath of ecological imperialism, uncontrollable rains, and rapid glacial melt pushed entire villages into rivers, erased crops, and swept away homes and roads. Thirty-three million people were affected. Almost eight million were displaced. Many were children. The country suffered more than $40 billion in damages, an impossible burden for a nation that produces less than one percent of global emissions. That disaster has become the reference point for every flood season since, a reminder that the next surge of water could be just as destabilizing.
Since 2022, flooding has arrived earlier, persisted longer, and overwhelmed infrastructure never designed for sustained inundation. In 2024 and 2025, large areas of Sindh and southern Punjab remained submerged for weeks, while northern regions experienced glacial lake outburst floods that destroyed bridges and isolated entire communities. These events were not unpredictable. Scientific assessments have long warned of accelerated glacial melt, altered rainfall patterns, and increasing river volatility. Under international environmental law, foreseeability is not incidental. It is the threshold that triggers legal responsibility.
At the same time, Pakistan’s legal obligations to address environmental harm predate the ICJ’s intervention. In Leghari v. Federation of Pakistan (2015), the Lahore High Court held that the government’s failure to implement its National Climate Change Policy violated citizens’ constitutional rights to life and dignity. The Court explicitly linked environmental degradation to fundamental rights and established a Climate Change Commission to oversee state compliance. This decision placed climate governance firmly within Pakistan’s domestic legal framework, framing environmental protection as a constitutional duty rather than a discretionary policy choice.
The ICJ’s advisory opinion builds upon Pakistan’s domestic legal foundation by clarifying how international law addresses climate-related harm caused by cumulative global emissions rather than isolated national conduct. The opinion does not adjudicate Pakistan’s claims or assign liability to specific states. Instead, it articulates legal standards that guide how such harm should be understood and addressed. Central to this framework is the no-harm principle, first articulated in the Trail Smelter Arbitration (United States v. Canada, 1941), which prohibits states from allowing activities within their jurisdiction to cause serious environmental damage elsewhere, even where harm results from diffuse and transboundary sources. Applied to the climate context, the Court recognized that where emissions and their consequences are scientifically established, states with high historical and current emissions have a duty to prevent foreseeable harm. Pakistan, which contributes a negligible share of global greenhouse gas emissions, has nevertheless experienced repeated flood devastation driven largely by warming caused elsewhere, placing its losses in 2024 and 2025 squarely within the category of legally relevant harm identified by the Court.
The Court also emphasized the duties of due diligence. States are required to take reasonable measures to regulate emissions, respond to scientific warnings, and prevent environmental harm. As the ICJ made clear, due diligence “entails not only the adoption of appropriate rules and measures, but also a certain level of vigilance in their enforcement and the exercise of administrative control.” Importantly, the Court linked failures of due diligence to violations of fundamental human rights, including the rights to life, health, housing, and a clean and healthy environment. When communities in Sindh spend weeks surrounded by stagnant water, or when children in flood-affected districts lose access to schools and clinics, climate inaction becomes a legally relevant rights violation rather than a purely humanitarian concern.
The advisory opinion further clarified the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. While all states share an obligation to address climate change, the Court emphasized that states with significant historical and current greenhouse gas emissions bear heightened duties of cooperation and assistance. In legal terms, this places primary responsibility on Annex II parties under the UNFCCC, which include developed states with recognized obligations to provide climate finance, adaptation support, and technology transfer to vulnerable countries. Although the ICJ stopped short of declaring climate reparations a binding legal requirement, it made clear that such support flows from legal obligation rather than discretionary generosity. This understanding aligns with how climate-vulnerable states, activists, and civil society organizations have articulated claims for compensation, including arguments highlighted in reporting by Al Jazeera that situate climate harm within a broader history of unequal contribution and unequal impact. For Pakistan, which has suffered billions of dollars in flood-related losses despite contributing a minute share of global emissions, this framework strengthens claims for loss and damage support directed toward historically high-emitting Annex II states whose cumulative emissions have materially contributed to the risks Pakistan now faces.
This international legal framework operates alongside Pakistan’s own responsibilities to protect its population. Recent flood seasons have exposed persistent weaknesses in domestic systems of prevention and response. Early-warning alerts often fail to reach remote communities. Embankments have weakened due to years of neglect. Unregulated construction along riverbanks has increased exposure, while drainage networks struggle to cope with changing rainfall patterns. Reports by the Federal Flood Commission have repeatedly identified these vulnerabilities, yet implementation of recommended reforms remains uneven.
Pakistan’s capacity to meet its climate obligations is further undermined by chronic political and judicial instability. Since its founding, no elected prime minister has completed a full term in office, producing repeated disruptions in governance and policy continuity. Climate adaptation, which requires long-term planning and sustained institutional commitment, has instead been shaped by short political cycles and entrenched civil–military power imbalances. Infrastructure priorities are often subordinated to security-driven considerations, as successive civilian governments operate within constraints imposed by military influence and elite accommodation. As a result, environmental initiatives introduced under one administration are frequently stalled or abandoned by the next, preventing durable investment in flood protection, infrastructure maintenance, and regulatory enforcement.
This instability has had concrete consequences for environmental governance. Former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government advanced several climate and conservation initiatives, including large-scale afforestation and adaptation programs, but these efforts were never fully institutionalized before his removal from office. His subsequent incarceration, amid intense political polarization and widespread criticism regarding judicial independence and civil–military interference, further fractured policy continuity. When courts are perceived as politicized, civilian leadership remains contingent on military approval, legal accountability weakens, and long-term planning becomes untenable. Flood defenses, drainage systems, and early-warning networks reflect this instability, deteriorating not only from technical neglect but from institutional deference and discontinuity. Under the ICJ’s advisory framework, such domestic fragility is no longer merely a governance failure; it becomes legally relevant to Pakistan’s ability to demonstrate good-faith compliance with its own duties of protection.
Therefore, meeting Pakistan’s legal obligations requires more than policy commitments. Current flood response plans demand enforceable legislation, modern water-monitoring systems, transparent land-use regulation, and community-based preparedness mechanisms. Comparative examples demonstrate that such reforms are achievable. Countries facing recurring flood risks, including Bangladesh and the Netherlands, have adopted integrated flood-management frameworks combining real-time monitoring, zoning restrictions, and national insurance schemes to distribute risk. These international examples show that effective flood protection is achievable, leaving implementation as the central challenge for Pakistan.
Pakistan’s flood crisis ultimately tests the capacity of law to endure beyond volatility. Climate risk does not arise suddenly; it accumulates where obligations are known, remedies are available, and enforcement is deferred. When infrastructure projects lapse with each change in government, when judicial directives lose consistency, and when development priorities yield to entrenched power arrangements, legal duty dissolves into administrative delay.
The significance of climate responsibility lies not in recognition, but in execution. Whether Pakistan can reduce flood vulnerability will turn on its ability to sustain lawful governance long enough for protection to be realized, and to demonstrate that legal commitments can survive the forces that have historically undone them.