Balancing Climate Mitigation Goals with Development: Insights from Pakistan

Balancing climate mitigation with development priorities poses a significant challenge for developing economies where climate action must be pursued alongside economic growth, energy access and tackling poverty. In Pakistan, the challenge gets compounded when national climate commitments rely on an optimistic growth trajectory for projecting baseline assumptions. This in result, risks the accurate assessment of mitigation ambition and policy needs. NDC baseline emissions are anchored to GDP growth of ~9%, while realized growth has averaged closer to ~4% over the last decade. Using MESSAGEix-Pakistan, a national integrated assessment model, we estimate business as usual assumptions to be about 50% lesser.  This gap results in inflated projected baseline emissions, making reported mitigation appear larger even when it reflects slower economic activity rather than policy-driven structural change.

To more structurally evaluate different dimensions of economy, we developed three scenario narratives in line with current NDC assumptions and Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs 1,2 & 5). For each, we first develop a current-measures scenario reflecting existing policies and then assess three mitigation benchmarks using fair share principles (ability-to-pay and equal-cumulative-per-capita) and a low-emissions pathway (LE). The range between ability-to-pay (AP) and equal-cumulative-per-capita (ECPC) defines defensible unconditional commitments; the gap between this range and the low-emissions pathway quantifies the case for conditional support.

Across scenarios, the model identifies consistent transition patterns including rapid electrification of buildings sector and phase out of traditional biomass for cooking under all pathways. While transport and industry remain challenging to decarbonize. In industry, coal phases out by 2060 under all emission-reduction scenarios (ECPC, AP, LE) and is replaced by gas and hydrogen. In the power sector, solar becomes the dominant technology by 2060 under AP and LE pathways, with wind as a complementary pillar. More ambitious mitigation pathways require substantially higher investment levels, particularly in the power sector, where achieving a low-emissions pathway entails nearly double the investment compared to equity-based pathways, highlighting the scale of international support needed to enable deeper emissions reductions.

Overall, the analysis demonstrates how integrated assessment modelling can be used to identify credible emissions baselines, quantify the space between feasible, fair, and conditional mitigation pathways, and link climate ambition with development constraints. These insights support the design of climate strategies that balance mitigation goals with development priorities, while anchoring long-term transitions in feasibility, equity, and transparent investment needs.