Syed Adeel Abbas brings over two decades of experience in climate change adaptation, resilience, and green growth to his role at the World Bank. He has led the development of the Middle East and North Africa Climate Change Roadmap and supported more than twenty policy and lending operations across the region. With a background spanning energy, urban development, and environment, he works at the intersection of climate strategy and practical finance, helping governments build projects that can attract the scale of funding real resilience requires.

Sohail Afridi serves as the 19th Chief Minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, making history as the youngest provincial chief minister in Pakistan and the first from the tribal areas. A grassroots politician who rose through student activism at the University of Peshawar, he has championed education reform, regional stability, and energy development, including expanding clean hydropower infrastructure across the province.

Sara Jane Ahmed is one of the world’s most influential voices in climate finance for vulnerable nations. As Managing Director and Finance Advisor to the V20 group of Finance Ministers representing 74 climate vulnerable countries, she developed the Climate Prosperity Plan framework to help nations move beyond aid dependency and into investment-led climate resilience. Founder of the Financial Futures Center and a recipient of the Climate Breakthrough Award, she has spent her career proving that green development is both an environmental necessity and an economic opportunity for the Global South.

Usman Zaheer Ahmed chairs Pakistan’s dairy industry association at a time when the livestock sector  which supports tens of millions of rural livelihoods and makes Pakistan one of the world’s largest milk producers  is absorbing climate pressure from multiple directions at once. Heat stress on cattle reduces yields and increases mortality. Flooding destroys the fodder crops that keep animals alive through the off-season. Shifting rainfall patterns make planning a season ahead increasingly unreliable for smallholder dairy farmers, who have neither the savings nor the insurance to absorb repeated losses. The dairy sector’s exposure to climate risk rarely gets the same attention as crop losses, but the scale of vulnerability is comparable. Ahmed brings the industry’s perspective into a conversation about how food systems can be made more resilient, and what the private sector can and must do to support the farmers at the bottom of the supply chain whose ability to keep producing depends on conditions they cannot control.

Dr. Noman Ahmed is one of Pakistan’s most respected voices on urban planning, housing, and the design of cities that can withstand the pressures of both rapid growth and climate change. As Pro Vice Chancellor at NED University of Engineering and Technology, he brings decades of academic and applied research to questions of how Pakistani cities are built, governed, and sustained. He has participated in major national conversations on urban resilience, contributing to UN-Habitat’s World Habitat Day deliberations on climate-smart urban planning and providing expert input on solid waste management, coastal ecosystems, and infrastructure design. His research and teaching engage directly with the challenges facing Karachi and other Pakistani cities as they navigate the intersection of informality, resource scarcity, and climate vulnerability. NED University has been a partner institution in the Waste Wise Cities Tool initiative for Karachi, and Dr. Ahmed’s involvement reflects the critical role that engineering and architecture education plays in producing the technical workforce and policy thinking that climate adaptation will require.

Romina Khurshid Alam is Pakistan’s point person on climate action at the executive level, having assumed the role of Coordinator to the Prime Minister on Climate Change in April 2024. As founding chairperson of the Parliamentary Caucus on Climate Change and former convener of the National Secretariat on SDGs, she has worked to mainstream environmental resilience across Pakistan’s legislative and economic frameworks. She advocates urgently for ESG integration, green finance taxonomy, and Paris Agreement-aligned NDCs as non-negotiable pillars of Pakistan’s sustainable future.

Shauzab Ali works at the Asian Development Bank’s Pakistan office, where the institution’s climate agenda and the country’s development needs converge most sharply. The ADB has committed over $43 billion to Pakistan since it began operations there, and climate action runs through a growing share of that portfolio  from post-flood reconstruction and renewable energy to water infrastructure and food system resilience. As a Principal Project Officer, Shauzab Ali sits at the operational heart of this work, where the challenge is not just designing the right projects but getting them funded, approved, and delivering on the ground in a country that is simultaneously managing a fiscal crisis and a climate emergency. Pakistan’s vulnerability is something he works with as a daily reality: a country ranked among the most climate-exposed in the world, whose need for adaptation finance far exceeds what has been made available.

Dr. Naveed Arshad directs the LUMS Energy Institute, one of Pakistan’s leading research centres on energy systems, policy, and transition. LUMS has been a key convener of national and regional conversations on clean energy, hosting the Asia Energy Transition Summit and providing an academic platform where government, industry, and civil society can engage with the research needed to guide Pakistan’s power sector transformation. The Energy Institute’s work spans technical modelling of power systems, policy analysis on renewable energy regulation, and engagement with the financial and governance dimensions of decarbonising Pakistan’s electricity grid. Dr. Arshad’s leadership of this institution places him at the centre of Pakistan’s intellectual infrastructure for the energy transition, a role that becomes more consequential as the country faces decisions about grid investment, fossil fuel phase-out, and the management of a rapidly growing distributed solar sector.

Mirey Atallah leads UNEP’s Adaptation and Resilience Branch, overseeing the agency’s work on ecosystem based adaptation, national adaptation planning, and loss and damage. With over two decades of experience spanning the Arab States and more than twenty countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, she has seen first hand what climate change does to rural communities when adaptation funding fails to keep up with worsening conditions. Her work focuses on making the case that the best climate defences are not just physical infrastructure but integrated, nature based, and locally owned, and she is actively pushing to mobilise both public and private finance to close the global adaptation gap.

A seasoned PML-N politician and Senior Provincial Minister, Maryam Aurangzeb has transformed from an nformation minister into one of Punjab’s most prominent climate advocates. Overseeing the province’s environment and climate change portfolio, she has driven an ambitious shift in how Punjab confronts its deepening ecological crisis.

Under her stewardship, Punjab allocated dedicated funds for smog mitigation at a scale previously unseen at the provincial level, while pushing the Annual Development Programme for the Environmental Protection Agency to completion ahead of schedule for the first time in history. She has championed a move away from crisis-driven responses toward structured, long-term environmental governance.

Beyond domestic policy, Aurangzeb has pursued what she calls climate diplomacy, advocating dialogue with Indian Punjab on the transboundary smog that chokes both sides of the border each winter. She has engaged foreign delegations from the United Kingdom and the United States on green technology partnerships, framing Punjab’s environmental ambitions within a wider regional and global context. In a country disproportionately ravaged by climate change it did little to cause, Maryam Aurangzeb has become an increasingly consequential voice in the fight for a liveable future.

Muhammad Aurangzeb leads Pakistan’s Ministry of Finance with a clear conviction that climate resilience and economic stability are inseparable. He co-launched Pakistan’s first ever National Climate Finance Strategy at COP29 and has championed the shift from project based climate spending to embedding resilience across national budgets. He is actively expanding green bonds, carbon markets, and debt for nature swaps as tools to attract the scale of investment Pakistan needs to protect its people and economy from deepening climate shocks.

Ziad Bashir brings the perspective of one of Pakistan’s leading textile companies to a climate conversation where the textile industry’s role is both central and contested. Pakistan’s textile sector is the backbone of its export economy, accounting for the vast majority of foreign exchange earnings, but it is also among the most resource-intensive, consuming large volumes of water and energy and contributing significantly to industrial emissions and effluent. The sector faces growing international scrutiny as major European and American buyers integrate sustainability requirements into their sourcing decisions. His participation signals a recognition within the textile industry that climate performance, environmental compliance, and sustainable production practices are no longer optional considerations but conditions for remaining competitive in global markets.

Alain Beauvillard directs strategy, policy, and innovation at the Green Climate Fund, the world’s largest dedicated climate finance institution. He previously served at France’s Treasury as Head of Multilateral Development and Climate Finance and worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before bringing that experience to the GCF. In his current role, he is exploring innovative financing models including capital market borrowing to help the GCF meet its ambitious climate funding targets for developing nations.

Dawar Hameed Butt has spent years making Pakistan’s air quality crisis legible to the public, to policymakers, and to the media. As co-director of the Pakistan Air Quality Initiative and a public policy, health, and sustainability consultant, he has been at the forefront of research and advocacy on air pollution, smog, and the health consequences of environmental degradation in Pakistan’s cities. His analysis during the COVID-19 lockdown demonstrated that nitrogen dioxide emissions dropped by nearly fifty percent in Lahore, thirty-five percent in Karachi, and over fifty percent in Islamabad when industrial activity ceased, offering a baseline that made visible what clean air could look like. He has argued compellingly for transboundary pollution management between Pakistan and India, pointing out that smog does not respect borders and that the Male Declaration framework for South Asian cooperation on air quality, while stalled, represents the right architecture for a regional solution. He has delivered sessions on climate sensitive budgeting and climate finance transparency for government officers, and written extensively on Pakistan’s climate governance landscape. He was also one of the organisers of the nationwide Climate Strikes across Pakistan and has represented the country’s climate civil society perspective at COP28.

A career civil servant with over 30 years of experience, she specializes in global climate finance and the mobilization of resources for high-risk, climate-vulnerable nations. Her strategic focus includes glacier resilience and transboundary cryosphere protection, advocating for regional cooperation to mitigate the impacts of rapid ice melt. Educated at the London School of Economics and Harvard, she brings a deep understanding of trade, policy, and development to the environmental sector. In Pakistan, she bridges the gap between scientific research and actionable federal policy. At international forums, she remains a key negotiator for equitable funding, highlighting Pakistan’s urgent need for sustainable investment to meet its 2035 emissions targets.

Fahd Chinoy, as CEO of Pakistan Cables Limited, one of Pakistan’s most trusted wire and cable manufacturers, has made sustainability a cornerstone of corporate strategy. He led the company’s Urban Forest Initiative, planting dozens of indigenous species at the Pakistan Cables factory site as part of a long term commitment to building a greener ecosystem. A strong advocate for responsible business, Chinoy also serves on the ESG sub-committee of the Overseas Investors Chamber of Commerce and Industry, where he actively shapes the sustainability agenda for Pakistan’s private sector.

Known widely as “Red,” Renato Redentor Constantino is a Manila-based policy strategist and essayist who spent over two decades as executive director of the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities (ICSC) in the Philippines. He served as adviser to the Climate Vulnerable Forum — the coalition of 55 nations most threatened by climate change — and played a critical behind-the-scenes role in anchoring the 1.5°C warming limit in the Paris Agreement, a threshold that vulnerable nations famously insisted upon with the rallying cry “1.5 to stay alive.” A member of the Philippines’ Adaptation Fund board and a published author on climate narratives, he bridges literary advocacy with hard-nosed climate finance and policy reform.

Rita Dhital, a career diplomat and former Joint Secretary at Nepal’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, took charge as Nepal’s Ambassador to Pakistan in late 2024. Since arriving in Islamabad she has pursued a brisk economic diplomacy agenda, reaching out to chambers of commerce from Karachi to Sialkot to make the case for expanded bilateral trade, restored air connectivity and private sector-led investment. On climate, she has drawn a sharp parallel between Nepal and Pakistan — both mountain nations bearing disproportionate costs of a crisis they did little to cause — and has called for unified advocacy on loss-and-damage finance and glacier preservation. She was recently instrumental in organising the International Vesak Day event at Taxila Museum, a reminder that cultural diplomacy too remains close to her brief.

Sardar Muhammad Awais Dreshak represents Rajanpur in the Punjab Assembly and holds a Master’s degree in International Relations from Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad. Before entering politics, he spent over a decade with the United Nations working across governance, health and advocacy, experience that now drives his environmental work at home.
As Convener of the Green and Disaster Risk Reduction Caucus, he has positioned the body as an active legislative force on climate action, pushing for stronger air quality controls, water conservation measures and the full implementation of Punjab’s Climate Change Policy Framework.

Fatima Faraz started speaking about climate change when most of her peers had not yet heard the term framed as something that concerned them personally. Based in Peshawar, she has used art, journalism, and street level activism to bring the climate conversation to audiences that formal policy rarely reaches. She has drawn attention to how heatwaves are quietly dismantling Pakistan’s agricultural base and threatening food security in ways that will hit children and the rural poor hardest. A member of the Prime Minister Youth Council and the Peshawar Clean Air Alliance, she has argued consistently that climate solutions imposed from above, without local context, will not hold.

Dr. Sharmila Faruqui is a Member of the National Assembly representing Pakistan Peoples Party and has been an active parliamentary voice on climate, energy, and water policy. She has raised concerns in the National Assembly about the operationalisation of the Loss and Damage Fund, pressing the government on the gap between international commitments and the funding actually delivered to countries like Pakistan. She has also been at the forefront of the parliamentary debate on Pakistan’s solar net metering policy, challenging the government when it moved to revise the terms for solar consumers, arguing that citizens who had invested in clean energy in good faith based on government policy deserved to have those commitments honoured. She has called for a Council of Common Interests meeting to address Sindh’s water crisis, linking water distribution to the climate-driven changes in rainfall and river flow that are reshaping agriculture across the province. Her parliamentary work reflects the understanding that climate change is not a single issue but a thread running through water, energy, agriculture, and economic security.

David Fugazza is a glaciologist at the University of Milan whose research tracks one of the most visible frontlines of climate change: the accelerating disappearance of mountain glaciers. Working within the university’s Department of Environmental Science and Policy, he applies satellite imagery and drone-based remote sensing to monitor glacier retreat across the Alps and, critically for Pakistan, the Karakoram-Himalayan range, one of the most glaciated regions outside the poles. His published work spans glacier mapping, darkening of ice surfaces, debris cover evolution, and the downstream consequences of melt for water systems and community safety. He has directly co-authored research on glaciers in the Batura, Passu, and Gulmit areas of Pakistan, regions where glacial lake outburst floods represent a growing threat to millions of people. His work works at the intersection of hard science and urgent human stakes, and he has also invested in making that science accessible  through climate education projects with schools in Italy and Turkey, and through public installations designed to bring the reality of glacier loss to urban audiences who have never seen a mountain.

Jorge Gastelumendi is a distinguished climate leader with over two decades of global expertise in climate policy and finance. As the Senior Director of the Atlantic Council’s Climate Resilience Center, he spearheads transformative solutions aimed at protecting one billion people from climate impacts by 2030. His extensive background includes roles as a carbon fund manager at the World Bank and co-chair of the Green Climate Fund’s board. He also currently serves as a co-lead for the UN High-Level Climate Champions’ Race to Resilience campaign and is an advocate for private sector mobilization, he focuses on bridging the gap between public policy and innovative finance for adaptation.

Syed Yousaf Raza Gillani is one of Pakistan’s most prominent statesmen, having served as Prime Minister of Pakistan from 2008 to 2012. A committed voice on climate diplomacy, he was designated as the Founding Chairman of the Inter-Parliamentary Speakers’ Conference, a global forum dedicated to fostering parliamentary dialogue and cooperation on challenges such as climate change, renewable energy, and water scarcity. He has repeatedly emphasised that Pakistan is among the countries most severely affected by climate change, and has called for effective policy-making, institutional responsibility, and public engagement to address the growing threats of extreme weather events, melting glaciers, and water scarcity.

Ali Gülcegün works at the forefront of the global push for clean energy as Project Manager at the Global Renewables Congress, a project of the World Future Council. Coordinating high level policy dialogues, managing strategic partnerships, and driving communications, he plays a central role in building the international frameworks needed to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels.

With a background in multilateral diplomacy and international policy, Ali brings a sharp global perspective to the fight against climate change. He holds a Master’s degree in Development Studies from the University of Bayreuth and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Relations from Marmara University.

Dr. Pema Gyamtsho is the first Director General of ICIMOD to come from the Hindu Kush Himalaya region itself, a fact that says as much about his appointment as his credentials. A Bhutanese scientist and former Minister of Agriculture and Forests, he spent over three decades working on natural resource management, biodiversity, and climate resilience before taking the helm of ICIMOD in 2020. He leads the organisation’s work across eight countries to protect the mountain ecosystems that feed and water over a billion people downstream, pushing hard on regional cooperation as glacial melt, floods, and ecosystem degradation accelerate across one of the world’s most climate vulnerable landscapes.

Dr. Mohsin Hafeez leads IWMI’s Strategic Programme on Water, Food and Ecosystems and has spent over 25 years working on water resources modelling, agricultural water management, and climate resilience across more than ten major river basins globally. In Pakistan, he has been instrumental in introducing digital planning tools including the Hydro-economic Model for the Indus Basin, helping the government make smarter, more data driven decisions about water distribution and climate adaptation. His view is straightforward: Pakistan cannot continue treating water, food, energy, and the environment as separate problems.

Hassan Khurrum Hanif works at the intersection of agriculture, sustainability, and systems change in Pakistan  a combination that has become one of the most consequential and underinvested spaces in the country’s development landscape. With a background that spans agribusiness, policy, and sustainability practice, he focuses on how food and farming systems can be rebuilt to perform under the intensifying pressure of climate stress, water scarcity, and market volatility. Pakistan’s agricultural sector employs the majority of its rural population and contributes nearly a quarter of GDP, yet it continues to operate largely on decades-old models that were designed for a more stable climate. Hanif is part of a generation of practitioners pushing to change that: through better data, smarter input use, regenerative practices, and the

Dr. Faisal Hashmi has spent years trying to give corporate sustainability in Pakistan the seriousness it deserves. As the senior-most voice on public affairs and sustainability at Coca-Cola Pakistan, he has built cross-sector coalitions spanning government, schools, airports, and civil society, working on waste segregation programmes with the Environmental Protection Agency of Punjab, tree plantation drives with the Lahore Development Authority, and climate resilience initiatives including Recharge Pakistan, which addresses flood risk management and wetland restoration across the country.

In 2026, Coca-Cola Pakistan received both the Excellence in Water Stewardship Award and the Innovation in Sustainability Award at the International CSR Summit, with Dr. Hashmi accepting both. He has framed these efforts not as philanthropy but as an acknowledgement that the private sector operates within an ecological system it has a direct stake in protecting.

Rana Tanveer Hussain leads the ministry that sits at the collision point of two of Pakistan’s most pressing crises: a food system under strain and a climate that is making farming harder every season. As Federal Minister for National Food Security and Research, he has overseen a government that is both trying to modernise agriculture through better seeds, technology, and private sector investment, and scrambling to defend it against erratic monsoons, heatwaves that now arrive before spring is done, and floods that erase in days what farmers spent months building. He has said plainly that climate change has emerged as a major challenge for Pakistan’s agricultural sector, driving declining yields in key crops including rice and wheat. He has taken that message to the FAO conference in Rome, to the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture in Berlin, and into high-level meetings with international partners, consistently pushing for the kind of investment in climate-resilient varieties and adaptive farming that Pakistan’s rural communities will actually need to survive the decades ahead.    

Hon. Bärbel Höhn is a German politician and former member of the Bundestag who has dedicated much of her career to the fight against climate change and the global transition to renewable energy. She previously served as Minister for Environment, Regional Planning and Agriculture for North Rhine-Westphalia, and continues her work as Commissioner for Energy Reform in Africa for Germany’s Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development. In 2018, she founded and has since chaired the Global Renewables Congress, a worldwide network of parliamentarians committed to advancing 100% renewable energy solutions. A regular participant in UN climate conferences, she has been a consistent and influential voice in international climate and energy policy for decades

Haneea Isaad has been one of Pakistan’s most rigorous and consistent analysts of the economics of clean energy, and her work has shaped how policymakers, investors, and civil society understand the financial realities of the country’s energy transition. Based in Pakistan and covering Asian energy markets for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, she has produced influential research on the socioeconomic impact of coal power development, the case for solar and wind based power systems, the risks in Pakistan’s hydropower pipeline, and the design of policy incentives for renewable energy investment. Her analysis of Pakistan’s LNG dependence has documented the fiscal and energy security risks of fossil fuel imports, and she has made the economic case for domestic renewables as a hedge against volatile global fuel prices. She has engaged directly with Pakistan’s net metering debate, examining how grid policy changes would affect both consumers and the broader clean energy ecosystem. Her work has been cited at the Asia Energy Transition Summit and by policymakers navigating the country’s shift away from expensive imported fossil fuels.

Pernille Ironside arrived in Pakistan at a moment when the country’s children are bearing the sharpest edge of a climate crisis they did nothing to cause. With over two decades of humanitarian experience across conflict and disaster zones, she has made climate resilience a non-negotiable thread running through UNICEF’s work here, from clean water access to flood response. She has been direct in stating that Pakistan’s children, nearly half the country’s population, cannot realise their potential if the systems meant to protect them keep collapsing under extreme weather. Her focus is not just on emergency response but on building the kind of durable infrastructure that does not wash away with every monsoon.

Sumera Izhar works at the hardest edge of Pakistan’s climate emergency, where the physical consequences of floods and disasters become the lived experience of millions of displaced people. As Recovery and Durable Solutions Advisor at the International Organization for Migration in Pakistan, she works on the long-term challenge of helping communities that have been uprooted by climate-induced disasters not just return, but rebuild in ways that reduce their vulnerability to the next catastrophe. Pakistan has faced one of the world’s most severe and sustained displacement crises driven by climate change. The 2022 floods displaced nearly eight million people, and over a year later more than one and a half million remained uneasy in their recovery. IOM’s approach under the framework she supports focuses on tackling structural vulnerabilities, expanding livelihoods, rehabilitating infrastructure, and fostering adaptation to the long-term effects of climate and environmental change. Her work also contributes to the policy processes that integrate human mobility and displacement into Pakistan’s National Adaptation Plan and Climate Change Action Plans, recognising that durable solutions to displacement are impossible without addressing the climate drivers that caused it.

Shafiullah Jan is the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government’s communications chief and a PTI member of the provincial assembly from Kohat. Appointed Special Assistant to Chief Minister Sohail Afridi for Information, Broadcasting and Public Relations in November 2025, he has become the administration’s most visible public voice — defending PTI’s political positions, highlighting the province’s development agenda, and raising uncomfortable questions about KP’s chronic underfunding. He has spoken out on the incomplete financial integration of the merged tribal districts, the mounting toll of terrorism and the devastating impact of climate change on a frontier province with limited fiscal space.

Aban Marker Kabraji is a distinguished conservation and climate expert with over 40 years of global experience. She previously served as Regional Director of IUCN Asia from 2003 to 2021, and currently advises UNEP’s Asia-Pacific Regional Director on climate and environment, as well as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank on biodiversity. A vocal advocate for climate action in South Asia, she has called for integrating air quality targets into Pakistan’s NDC revision, scaling up climate finance, and fostering regional cooperation for shared environmental challenges. In recognition of her outstanding contributions to conservation and development, she was awarded Pakistan’s civil honour, the Tamgha-i-Imtiaz, in 2018.

Ali Hamza Kamal is a leading voice in integrating climate-smart innovation with large-scale agricultural strategy. With a focus on the unique vulnerabilities of Pakistan’s farming landscape, he spearheads initiatives in regenerative agriculture, digital advisory services, and resource-efficient crop protection.His leadership highlights the critical role of agribusiness in driving the transition toward a carbon-neutral and food-secure future.

Ammar H. Khan leads the National Credit Guarantee Company Limited, an institution with a direct role in unlocking private finance for Pakistan’s clean energy and climate-resilient development agenda. Credit guarantee mechanisms are one of the most powerful but underutilised tools for mobilising investment in sectors and geographies that commercial banks consider too risky, and Pakistan’s transition to renewable energy, resilient agriculture, and climate-smart infrastructure depends heavily on whether such financing can be made to flow at scale. His work sits at the junction of financial systems and climate outcomes, a space that is increasingly recognised as central to whether Pakistan can attract and deploy the investment its climate adaptation and mitigation commitments require. Pakistan has repeatedly highlighted the gap between international climate finance pledges and actual funding delivered, and institutions like NCGCL play a critical domestic role in bridging that gap by reducing perceived risk and building the pipeline of bankable climate projects.

Seema A. Khan is a globally recognized strategy leader with over 25 years of experience across government, investment, and multilateral institutions. Her work focuses on bridging vision and impact through large-scale economic and innovation programs that drive socio-economic and community returns. Khan has held advisory roles within G20 and UN-related initiatives, emphasizing inclusive and holistic global change.

Jawed Ali Khan is one of Pakistan’s most experienced practitioners working at the intersection of climate policy and sustainable urban development. As Senior Advisor and Programme Manager at UN Habitat Pakistan, he brings decades of work spanning government, international organisations, and field level implementation. For more than ten years he served as Pakistan’s National Focal Point for the UNFCCC, UN Habitat, UNEP, and several other UN bodies, representing the country in international climate negotiations and technical working groups around the world. During that period he played a direct role in shaping some of Pakistan’s most important environmental frameworks, including the National Climate Change Policy, the National Environment Policy, and the National Sustainable Development Policy. In his current role at UN Habitat, he has worked with Pakistan’s federal government to develop a National Urban Development Strategy focused on climate resilient and inclusive urban growth. He has also championed the Zero Waste Cities agenda in Pakistan, drawing attention to the links between waste, plastic pollution, urban resilience, and the broader climate crisis. His career reflects a sustained commitment to translating global climate commitments into concrete policy and action on the ground.

Fahmida Khan brings over two decades of experience in gender and development to a country where women and girls absorb a disproportionate share of every climate shock. In Pakistan, ranked among the ten most climate affected countries in the world, women in flood hit communities are typically the last to be evacuated, the first to lose livelihoods, and the least likely to have a seat at the table when recovery is being planned. Khan’s work at UN Women has been to change that, connecting gender equality directly to climate resilience and making the case that one cannot be achieved without the other.

Jam Kamal Khan brings the trade and commerce perspective to Pakistan’s climate conversation, a dimension that is increasingly impossible to separate from environmental policy. As Federal Minister for Commerce, he oversees a portfolio that sits at the intersection of international competitiveness and the global green economy. Pakistan’s exports, particularly in textiles, agriculture, and manufacturing, face growing pressure from trading partners and international markets around carbon intensity, environmental standards, and supply chain sustainability. The European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism and similar instruments are beginning to reshape the economics of trade in ways that make climate performance a matter of commercial survival for export-oriented economies like Pakistan. His role makes the business case for climate action visible in a different register: not only as a moral obligation or a development imperative, but as a condition for Pakistan’s continued access to the global markets on which its economic future depends.

Najeeb Ullah Khan is the Deputy Director at Network Operations & Maintenance Center Department NOMC . He looks after the network operations, network deployment and corporate business support for Zong network nationwide. He has a two-decade experience in telecom industry. He graduated from NED University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi and then did his Masters of Sciences in Telecom from NYIT, USA.

Ali Farid Khawaja’s career quietly dismantles the idea that climate action and capital markets reform are separate conversations. A Rhodes Scholar and co-founder of KTrade Securities, he was appointed SECP Commissioner in early 2026, bringing to Pakistan’s chief financial regulator a rare combination of entrepreneurial experience and Oxford-trained financial economics.

Before joining the SECP, he led Critical Metals PLC, placing him at the centre of one of the energy transition’s defining questions: how the world secures the minerals essential to solar panels, electric vehicles, and battery storage without deepening existing inequalities. At the SECP, the task is now regulatory. Pakistan urgently needs green bonds, ESG-aligned frameworks, and market infrastructure that can channel private capital toward climate-resilient projects. Khawaja is the kind of appointment that suggests the institution understands what is at stake.

With over two decades of experience within the United Nations system, Anupa Rimal Lamichhane specializes in climate finance, risk management, and building resilience for vulnerable rural communities. Her work focuses on integrating climate adaptation into agricultural projects, ensuring that small-scale producers can mitigate environmental risks through innovative policy and field-level interventions.

Sardar Awais Ahmad Khan Leghari has overseen one of the most significant energy transitions in Pakistan’s recent history. As Federal Minister for Power, he has driven Pakistan’s renewable energy agenda with notable ambition, presiding over a period in which the country reached fifty-two percent of its electricity generation from clean and renewable sources and set a target of ninety percent clean energy by 2035. He has anchored Pakistan’s commitment to sixty percent renewable energy in the national power mix by 2030 and has been actively engaged with regional cooperation mechanisms including the ECO Clean Energy Centre. He has promoted microgrids and decentralised energy systems in rural areas, pushed for smart metering and grid digitalisation, and navigated the complex politics of solar net metering policy as rooftop solar installations transformed Pakistan’s energy landscape. He has spoken candidly about the paradox Pakistan faces as a country contributing less than one percent of global emissions while being among the ten most climate-vulnerable nations, and has used that injustice as an argument for both domestic clean energy ambition and international support for Pakistan’s green transition.

Dr. Dapeng Luo has been consistent in his message since taking charge of WHO’s operations in Pakistan: climate change is not a future health threat, it is a present one. He has watched rising temperatures and repeated flooding drive malaria cases upward across endemic districts, trigger mass cholera outbreaks, and worsen child malnutrition in communities that were already struggling. His response has been to push for health systems that are built for this reality, with medicines prepositioned before monsoons arrive and response teams that move before the damage is done. He has made clear that saving lives in Pakistan today means accepting that the climate crisis and the health crisis are the same crisis.

Idrees Mahsud is a senior civil servant of the 26th Common Secretariat Group with more than two decades of experience in public policy, governance, and disaster risk management. He currently serves as a Member (Disaster Risk Reduction) at the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), overseeing work on DRR policy, anticipatory action and provincial coordination. He has led national initiatives on disaster risk reduction, multi-hazard risk assessment, disaster risk financing, and climate change adaptation. His work focuses on transforming Pakistan’s disaster management approach from reactive emergency response to proactive risk-informed planning and resilience building.

In his career, Mr. Mahsud has led the development and implementation of innovative DRR tools & strategies, and overseen implementation of several donor-funded projects with partners such as the World Bank, UNDP, DFID, and SDC, and coordinated national response operations to major disasters, including the 2022, 2010 and 2011 floods, and COVID-19 pandemic. His contributions extend to policy design, recovery planning, and international cooperation, positioning NDMA as a key player in regional and global DRR initiatives.

Senator Musadik Masood Malik took charge of Pakistan’s climate portfolio in 2025 with a clear sense of urgency. He has identified air pollution, water access, solid waste management and glacial melt as the country’s most pressing environmental threats, and has been pushing hard for climate resilient development across all sectors. A vocal advocate for climate justice, he has repeatedly called out the gap between global commitments and actual funding delivered to vulnerable nations like Pakistan, which loses nearly one percent of its GDP to climate damage annually despite contributing less than one percent of global emissions.

Zafar Masud has led the Bank of Punjab through a transformation that goes beyond balance sheets, embedding green financing and climate-resilient lending into the strategic identity of the country’s second largest public sector bank. As Chairman of the Pakistan Banks Association, he has argued consistently that financial institutions cannot treat climate change as an externality. Agriculture, water resources, and the livelihoods of millions of small borrowers are directly exposed to climate shocks, and a bank that ignores this is not managing risk, it is accumulating it.

His support for Pakistan’s Green Taxonomy Framework, electric vehicle financing initiatives, and interest-free agricultural machinery loans for small farmers all reflect a development finance philosophy that treats climate vulnerability as a structural economic condition rather than an episodic emergency. The question, as he frames it, is not whether Pakistani banks should engage with climate finance. It is how quickly the sector can build the instruments to do so at scale.

Muhammad Omar Masud leads the Urban Unit, Punjab’s data-driven policy and design think tank within government, and brings to that role a rare combination of academic depth and civil service experience. He completed his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in urban and regional planning and holds a Master of Public Policy from Princeton University. His work at the Urban Unit focuses on using spatial data and technology to develop local implementation strategies for the environmental and infrastructure challenges that come with Pakistan’s rapid urbanisation. Under his leadership, the Urban Unit has been deeply involved in the development of Lahore’s Climate Action Plan, collaborating with WWF Pakistan on water, hydrology, and biodiversity data, and setting a precedent for participatory climate planning that aligns local solutions with global climate goals. He has been a vocal speaker on air quality and environmental governance, engaging directly with provincial government and civil society on what it will take to make Punjab’s cities livable and sustainable. His approach treats climate adaptation not as a separate policy domain but as something that must be embedded in how cities are planned, financed, and managed.

Anouj Mehta is a leading expert in innovative and green finance, currently serving as the Country Director for Thailand at the Asian Development Bank (ADB). He previously headed the ASEAN Catalytic Green Finance Facility (ACGF), a pioneering $2 billion initiative designed to accelerate green infrastructure and climate-resilient recovery across Southeast Asia. With a career spanning over two decades, he has held key roles at JP Morgan Chase and the World Bank, specializing in public-private partnerships and sustainable capital markets. Mehta is a champion of nature-based solutions and has led high-impact projects such as the Shandong Green Development Fund and the “Green Recovery Program” approved by the Green Climate Fund. A frequent speaker at international forums like COP 28, he focuses on bridging the climate financing gap through blended finance and SDG-aligned bonds.

Owais Mir founded Dynamic Engineering and Automation with a focus on bringing advanced engineering solutions to Pakistan’s energy and infrastructure sectors. His work is part of a broader ecosystem of technology and engineering companies that are essential to the practical delivery of Pakistan’s clean energy ambitions. The country’s solar revolution has advanced at an extraordinary pace, with tens of gigawatts of solar panels imported in recent years, but scale requires not just hardware but the engineering, automation, and system integration capabilities that companies like DEA provide. His presence at this conference reflects the private sector’s role as a delivery partner for the energy transition, one that moves between policy aspiration and physical infrastructure.

Masood-ul-Mulk is a leading Pakistani expert on humanitarian aid and the Chief Executive Officer of the Sarhad Rural Support Programme (SRSP), where he has spearheaded sustainable development for over 20 years. He is globally recognized for leading SRSP to win the prestigious Ashden Award (the “Green Oscar”) for bringing renewable micro-hydro energy to over 365,000 people in remote, climate-vulnerable mountain regions. An expert in climate change adaptation, he has implemented eco-friendly agricultural practices and established over 280 nurseries to enhance rural resilience.

Dr. Zeelaf Munir is Managing Director & CEO of EBM, Pakistan’s largest FMCG, and Chairperson of the Pakistan Business Council (PBC). She is also a member of the Planning Board, Ministry of Planning, Development, and Special Initiatives, Government of Pakistan, and serves on the Boards of LUMS foundation, Habib University Foundation, and iCare Foundation. A physician by training, with degrees from Dow University, Johns Hopkins, and Washington Univ. School of Medicine, her 25+ year career spans medicine, industry, and public policy. At Breathe Pakistan, she sits at the point where agri-based value added business and government meet, speaking for the private sector whose capital, operations, and supply chains will determine whether Pakistan’s climate response is financed and delivered on the ground.

Nusrat Nasab has built her career on understanding what climate change actually means for the most vulnerable communities in Pakistan’s mountain regions. Working with the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat, she has led hazard and risk assessments across Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral, mapping the growing threat of glacial lake outburst floods, landslides, and flash floods to villages that have few resources to protect themselves. She has presented her research at international conferences and contributed to landmark publications on disaster risk reduction in the Hindu Kush Himalaya, consistently making the case that early warning systems and community preparedness are not optional extras but lifesaving necessities.

General Shahid Nazir leads the Green Pakistan Initiative, the government’s flagship programme to expand forest cover and restore ecosystems across the country. Pakistan’s forest cover has historically been among the lowest in South Asia, and decades of deforestation have left landscapes more vulnerable to flooding, erosion, and the kind of runaway heat that has made recent summers increasingly life-threatening. The Green Pakistan Initiative sits within a broader national push to use tree planting and ecosystem restoration not just as climate mitigation but as a tool for rural employment, watershed protection, and long-term flood resilience. As its chief executive, Nazir brings the kind of institutional weight and implementation capacity to the programme that large-scale tree planting demands: coordinating across provinces, engaging local communities, managing supply chains for saplings at national scale, and measuring outcomes rigorously enough to justify continued investment. The work is unglamorous and complicated, but it is among the most tangible things Pakistan can do to build its own ecological defences in the years ahead.

Damilola Ogunbiyi is one of the most influential figures in the global energy transition and a tireless advocate for the developing world’s right to clean, affordable power. As CEO of Sustainable Energy for All and Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy, she has built an organisation that has supported over one hundred countries and secured commitments of more than 1.6 trillion dollars in energy finance. Named to the TIME100 Climate list as one of twenty titans in climate in 2024, and to the TIME Earth Awards in 2026, she has consistently argued that the clean energy transition must be just and equitable, leaving no one behind, particularly in the Global South. She has been a co-chair of the Mission 300 initiative targeting electricity access for three hundred million Africans by 2030, and has championed the UN Energy Compacts that hold governments and corporations to concrete action on SDG7. She received the First Class Order of Zayed II from the UAE President for her contributions to COP28. Her work makes the fundamental case that energy poverty and climate change are two sides of the same crisis, and that solving one without addressing the other is neither just nor possible

James Robert Okoth leads the FAO’s work in Pakistan at a moment when the gap between the country’s food production needs and its actual output has never been wider or more precarious. Pakistan feeds over 240 million people, relies on agriculture for nearly a quarter of its GDP and the livelihoods of the majority of its rural workforce, and yet the sector is being systematically weakened by the same climate shocks that hit hardest in the very communities that grow the food. The FAO’s Pakistan operation has been central to the flood response, to efforts to rebuild agriculture in the aftermath of 2022, and to longer-term work on climate-smart farming, soil health, and water efficiency. Okoth represents an organisation that sees hunger and climate as inseparable problems, and that has been working in Pakistan’s most vulnerable provinces long enough to know the difference between a short-term intervention and the kind of systemic change that actually builds resilience.

Tariq Alexander Qaiser is a multifaceted professional with 37 years of architectural experience, specializing in school and hospital design. He’s also a poet, author, filmmaker, and environmentalist. Time Magazine recognized his work on Karachi’s mangroves in their July 2022 Oceans Issue. Tariq has presented internationally, including at COP27, and is currently involved in film production and authoring a series of books on the Indus Delta, all while running his architectural practice.

Anam Rathor has made it her mission to ensure Pakistan’s vulnerability is neither overlooked nor understated. As Programme Lead at the CVF-V20, the coalition of 74 of the world’s most climate-exposed nations, she works to translate abstract policy commitments into investment-ready outcomes, pushing for green bonds, carbon market mechanisms, and creditworthy project pipelines as practical bridges between Pakistan’s climate goals and global capital.

Her career spans UNDP, GIZ, and DAI, and she now leads Pakistan’s Climate Prosperity Plan, an effort to shift the national climate narrative from burden to leverage. From Islamabad’s streets to COP negotiating floors, her argument remains consistent: the world’s most vulnerable cannot afford to wait.

Furrukh Raza represents the private sector’s growing recognition that the shift to clean transportation is both a business opportunity and a climate imperative. At Capital Smart Motors, he leads marketing, communications, and people functions for a company operating in Pakistan’s emerging electric vehicle sector. The transportation sector is a significant contributor to urban air pollution in Pakistan’s cities, and the transition to electric vehicles carries the potential to reduce both emissions and the health costs of pollution that affect millions of urban residents. His presence at this conference reflects the importance of private sector communication and consumer behaviour change in Pakistan’s clean energy transition. Making electric mobility aspirational, accessible, and understood by the public is as important as the policy frameworks that govern it, and it is a space where marketing and communications leadership plays a direct role in shaping the pace of adoption.

Muhammad Raza leads General Services and Customer Support at Meezan Bank, Pakistan’s largest Islamic bank, an institution with significant reach across the economy and a growing interest in green and sustainable finance. Islamic finance principles, with their emphasis on asset-backed transactions, shared risk, and ethical investment, offer a natural alignment with the principles of sustainable finance, and Meezan Bank is among the institutions exploring how Islamic finance instruments can be structured to fund climate adaptation and clean energy projects. His role in shaping how a large financial institution manages its operations, serves its customers, and builds institutional systems is directly relevant to how banks respond to the climate challenge from the inside, from greening their own operations to supporting customers in sectors facing climate-related transitions.

Senator Sherry Rehman is one of Pakistan’s most prominent climate advocates, serving as Chair of the Climate and Environment Caucus in the Senate, a body she founded to bring legislative weight to the country’s environmental challenges. A former Federal Minister for Climate Change, she has spent years pushing hard on issues ranging from smog and water scarcity to glacial melt and flood resilience. Named among TIME’s 100 Most Influential People of 2023 and the Financial Times’ 25 Most Influential Women of 2022, she carries Pakistan’s climate story to global audiences with a directness that few can match.

Nadia Rehman serves on the Board of Trustees of the Climate Risk Fund at the State Bank of Pakistan, placing her at the centre of one of the most important questions in Pakistan’s climate response: how to build a financial system that accounts for, prices, and manages climate risk at scale. Central bank engagement with climate change has emerged as one of the most consequential developments in global finance over the past decade, and the State Bank’s Climate Risk Fund represents Pakistan’s effort to embed climate considerations into its monetary and regulatory framework. Her work involves ensuring that the resources mobilised through this fund are directed effectively toward adaptation and resilience, and that the broader financial sector develops the tools, standards, and incentive structures needed to channel private capital toward climate-positive outcomes.

Shehzad Roy is one of Pakistan’s most prominent cultural figures and a committed social entrepreneur whose work through Zindagi Trust has transformed education for thousands of underserved children. Through a model of adopting and reforming government schools, Zindagi Trust has demonstrated that public education infrastructure can be made to work even in contexts of resource scarcity and institutional weakness. His connection to the climate agenda runs through the recognition that the children most vulnerable to climate change are precisely those whose education, health, and futures Zindagi Trust works to protect. Extreme heat is already disrupting school attendance in Pakistan, and the social disruption caused by floods, displacement, and economic stress falls heaviest on families least equipped to absorb it. His participation at this conference speaks to the importance of civil society, public engagement, and youth voices in building the social consensus for climate action that policy alone cannot create.

Kazim Saeed spent 25 years advising developing country governments on energy policy for the World Bank before turning his attention to Pakistan’s agricultural sector, where he co-founded the Pakistan Agricultural Coalition, a non-profit backed by 20 of the country’s largest business groups. He brought to agriculture the same instinct he brought to energy: that the private sector, given the right models and incentives, can move faster and at a greater scale than aid programmes alone. His writing and advocacy have been consistent on one point  that Pakistan’s farmers are not the problem. They are the country’s most climate-literate citizens, the people who have been feeling the shift in weather patterns for a decade longer than anyone in Islamabad or Karachi, and they deserve not just awareness campaigns but concrete instruments like crop insurance, better seed, and working markets. Saeed has appeared at previous Breathe Pakistan conferences and written extensively on how climate change is already reshaping Pakistan’s food economy, from cotton failures in the south to wheat yield losses triggered by a heatwave that erased spring entirely.

Saleemullah serves as Deputy Governor of the State Bank of Pakistan, where he oversees digital financial services, financial inclusion, and green banking. He has been a leading voice in developing Pakistan’s national green taxonomy, an initiative that will make Pakistan only the third country in South Asia to classify and regulate sustainable economic activities. His work focuses on giving regulators, banks, and investors a shared language to make informed decisions on funding green projects and scaling climate resilient finance across the economy

Dr. Erum Sattar holds a Doctorate in Juridical Sciences from Harvard University, where her research focused on water federalism and transboundary water sharing in the Indus River Basin. She leads the Sustainable Water Management Programme at Tufts University and has taught water law and policy across some of the world’s top institutions. Her current work sits at the intersection of climate change and water governance, examining the legal and institutional frameworks societies need to build as floods, droughts, and shifting rainfall patterns grow more severe. For Pakistan, she remains one of the most authoritative voices on what good water law actually looks like in practice.

Dr. Zeba Sathar has spent over three decades building the evidence base that Pakistan’s policymakers need but have often been reluctant to act on. Her research has traced the links between rapid population growth, poverty, and climate vulnerability, showing how disasters like the 2022 floods do not strike randomly but fall hardest on communities already living closest to the edge. She has led work on how climate shocks reshape migration patterns, livelihoods, and health behaviour at the district level, and has argued that food security, climate policy, and population planning must be addressed as a single connected challenge rather than as separate bureaucratic silos.

Farrukh Shad manages region’s Energy, Sustainability Services and Sustainability Consulting organisation at Schneider Electric, with the mission to help large enterprises deliver climate mitigation actions and reduce carbon emissions using technological solutions. Leading a global team, he crafts unique strategies and solutions that help clients navigate the multitude of challenges in emerging markets in the region as they work towards meeting their and their suppliers’ renewable energy and carbon neutrality goals.

Syed Ghulam Mustafa Shah has served in Pakistan’s National Assembly for over two decades and currently holds the office of Deputy Speaker. Representing Nawabshah in Sindh, he chairs the Standing Committee on Climate Change and Environment and has been instrumental in advancing Pakistan’s National Climate Change Policy at the federal level. His constituency sits on the Indus floodplain, one of the regions most devastated by the 2022 super floods, and he has consistently used his platform to ensure that the climate crisis facing southern Pakistan is treated as a national legislative priority. He was also part of Pakistan’s broader parliamentary push for the Loss and Damage Fund secured at COP27.

Syed Awais Qadir Shah presides over the assembly of the province that bore the worst of Pakistan’s 2022 super floods, and he brings both an engineer’s technical grounding and a legislator’s determination to the climate challenge. Before becoming Speaker of the Sindh Assembly, he served as the province’s Minister for Transport and Mass Transit, giving him direct experience of the infrastructure pressures that climate adaptation places on the government. He hosted the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association Asia Regional Conference in 2026, where he put climate change at the centre of the agenda alongside democratic resilience and poverty. His focus on flood management, water systems and coastal vulnerability reflects the scale of what Sindh faces as a low lying delta province threatened by riverine flooding and rising seas.

Kamran Siddiqui works at IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency, in its Energy and Infrastructure programme, bringing an international perspective and multilateral expertise to Pakistan’s domestic energy conversations. IRENA is the principal intergovernmental body driving the global renewable energy transition, and its Programme Officers work with member governments to develop the policies, targets, planning frameworks, and investment environments needed to accelerate deployment of clean energy. His engagement with Pakistan’s context links the country’s national energy ambitions to the global architecture of knowledge, standards, and financing that IRENA facilitates. In a country that has committed to sixty percent renewable energy by 2030 and is navigating the transformation of a power sector burdened by legacy capacity, the technical and policy expertise that IRENA brings is directly relevant to the decisions ahead.

Michael Ashley Stein has spent years making an argument that the climate movement has been slow to hear: that persons with disabilities are among the most exposed to climate disaster and among the least represented in the rooms where climate policy is decided. His research shows that people with disabilities are two to four times more likely to die in climate related disasters than those without, a statistic he has taken to the United Nations, to scientific journals, and to the G7. He co-founded the Harvard Law School Project on Disability and has used it to push disability inclusion into international climate frameworks, arguing that any adaptation plan that does not account for access and mobility is incomplete by design.

Dr. Murtaza Syed heads the Ecosystem department at the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in Beijing, drawing on over 25 years of experience at the IMF and as Deputy Governor of the State Bank of Pakistan. At AIIB, his work focuses on connecting climate economics with infrastructure investment, particularly cross border connectivity projects that combine poverty reduction with lower carbon emissions. A PhD economist from Oxford, he is one of the few professionals who has worked at the highest levels of both monetary policy and multilateral climate finance.

Azam Nazeer Tarar has approached climate action as a question of constitutional rights, and the results speak for themselves. As Federal Minister for Law and Justice, he presented and secured the passage of Article 9A of Pakistan’s Constitution in October 2024, formally making the right to a clean and healthy environment a fundamental right of every citizen. This marked the beginning of environmental constitutionalism in Pakistan and created a legal basis for holding the state accountable for environmental harm. He has also argued at international parliamentary forums that climate change is a human rights crisis, calling on high emitting nations to match their commitments with real funding for vulnerable countries like Pakistan.

Kashif Thanvi leads Acumen’s work in Pakistan, where the impact investment firm has placed its bets on a simple but difficult proposition: that the private sector can and should be solving problems for the people most affected by poverty and climate change, not just serving those who can already afford solutions. Acumen’s work in Pakistan’s agricultural space has included the country’s first climate equity fund  worth $90 million  designed to back agribusinesses working with smallholder farmers who are disproportionately exposed to climate shocks and have the fewest resources to absorb them. Thanvi works in the space where investment meets impact, where the question is not just whether a business can grow but whether it can grow in a way that actually improves the conditions of the farmers, labourers, and communities it serves. In a country where climate stress is accelerating and social protection systems remain thin, patient capital and mission-aligned investment have a specific and urgent role to play.

High Commissioner of the Republic of Maldives to Pakistan
H.E. Mohamed Thoha has served as the Maldives’ High Commissioner to Pakistan since presenting his credentials to President Asif Ali Zardari. An energetic advocate of bilateral engagement, he has worked to broaden ties beyond diplomacy — championing direct air links, tuna export opportunities and Pakistani investment in Maldivian real estate. He has been vocal about reviving SAARC as a functional platform for South Asian cooperation and has actively engaged Pakistan’s chambers of commerce to unlock trade potential between the two Muslim-majority nations.

Ellen Mpangananji Thom is a seasoned public health expert with over 30 years of experience across Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. Currently with WHO Pakistan, she has emerged as a leading voice on the intersection of climate change and health, highlighting the severe impact of air pollution and environmental degradation on public health in the country. She served as Acting WHO Representative in Pakistan (2023–2024) and continues to advocate for recognizing the climate crisis as an immediate health emergency.

Coco Ushiyama runs the WFP’s operations in a country that consistently ranks among the world’s most food-insecure and most climate-exposed at the same time. Those two facts are not coincidental  they are directly linked, and she has made that connection central to how WFP works in Pakistan. Under her leadership, the organisation secured a $9.8 million Green Climate Fund grant to build early warning systems and anticipatory action frameworks in flood-prone communities, putting climate resilience at the core of what has historically been understood as a humanitarian programme. She has pushed for a government cooperation framework that treats climate change as one of the four structural drivers of malnutrition in Pakistan, alongside conflict, economic downturns, and governance failures. Her argument is a straightforward one: you cannot build food security in Pakistan without building climate resilience, and you cannot build climate resilience without treating food systems as a central concern.

Tom Xiaojun Wang is an environmental activist, writer, and the founder of People of Asia for Climate Solutions, a nonprofit based in Manila that works across the Asian continent to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels. Growing up in Shanxi Province, China’s largest coal producing region, Wang witnessed firsthand the devastating environmental toll of coal mining on communities, farmland, and air quality. That experience became the driving force behind a career in climate advocacy. Before founding PACS in 2018, he spent over a decade leading communications work for Greenpeace, World Animal Protection, and the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids in China. He is a TED speaker and published author whose work amplifies the voices of climate affected communities and makes the case for a just and rapid energy transition across Asia.

Mian Muhammad Mueen Wattoo heads Pakistan’s Ministry of Water Resources at a time when the country’s water challenges have rarely been more urgent. He has made expanding water storage capacity and flood control central priorities, chairing high level government meetings on both and pushing for the timely completion of critical projects like the K-IV water supply scheme for Karachi. He has also been active in building international partnerships around water security, meeting with delegations from the World Bank, Poland, and Qatar to explore cooperation on flood resilience and sustainable water infrastructure.

Mohamed Yahya, with over 20 years of experience in development and peacebuilding, was previously the UNDP Resident Representative in Nigeria, overseeing one of the largest country portfolios in Africa, with a presence in five out of six
geopolitical zones. Prior to this, he served as the Coordinator for the Africa Regional Programme at UNDP in Addis Ababa, managing regional development initiatives for the African Union and Africa’s Regional Economic Communities. Yahya has also held roles as a post-conflict recovery specialist in Afghanistan and Liberia, and as coordinator for a UN joint initiative on natural resource management. Before joining the UN, he was a senior peacebuilding advisor for International Alert. Mr. Yahya holds a Master’s in Violence, Conflict and Development and a bachelor’s in Politics and History from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Uzma Yousuf has made a straightforward bet: that if Pakistan is to survive what is coming, its students need to understand why. As the driving force behind the Cambridge Climate Quest programme in Pakistan, she has worked to embed climate literacy across school curricula nationwide, reaching students on every educational board through a free, locally contextualised course that draws on Pakistan’s own disasters, the 2010 floods and Lahore’s air pollution crisis, rather than abstract global examples. She has described the programme not as an academic exercise but as a call to action, and has pushed hard to get government ministries to carry it into as many classrooms as possible.

Makhdoom Fakhar Zaman is a legislator representing PS-57 Matiari-I, elected in the 2024 general elections. With academic training in political science and global business management, he brings a nuanced understanding of governance, public policy, and economic systems to his legislative work.

He currently serves as Spokesperson for the Government of Sindh and Parliamentary Secretary for the Home and Interior Department, where he contributes to policy formulation and public communication. His roles on the Public Accounts Committee and the Standing Committee on Agriculture highlight his focus on accountability, institutional effectiveness, and sustainable development.