Murtaza Wahab, Mayor, Karachi

Barrister Murtaza Wahab leads the administration of Pakistan’s largest city and has made the climate crisis a defining theme of his mayoralty. Karachi has been a member of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and is one of the few Pakistani cities developing a dedicated Climate Action Plan in collaboration with UNDP and C40. He has committed the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation as the custodian of this plan and dedicated a core team to its development. At the Pavilion Mayors Conference in Dubai, he spoke frankly about the climate disasters Karachi has faced including the catastrophic 2022 floods and the deadly 2015 heatwave that killed over a thousand people, and called on the international community to work together to support cities on the frontline of climate change. He has also championed the development of urban forests to improve air quality, solar and wind energy infrastructure for the city, and the expansion of stormwater drains to address the reality that Karachi’s drainage system was designed for forty millimetres of rainfall when the city now regularly receives multiples of that in a single day. He has been consistently direct about the gap between what nature is now delivering and what Karachi’s infrastructure can handle.