‘Ecological crisis creates a challenge and an opportunity for the left’

Ayesha Ahmad, a Pakistani socialist-feminist activist, researcher, educator, and labour rights practitioner with the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party, was one of the guest speakers at the Ecosocialism 2026 conference in Magan-djin/Brisbane, September 11–13. She spoke to Green Left’s Peter Boyle about the impact of the mounting global ecological crisis on politics in Pakistan.

The catastrophic flash floods in Nepal as a result of global warming and the melting of the Himalayan glaciers were a warning to the world, but does it have a special significance for Pakistan, which also borders the Himalayas?

The catastrophic flash floods in Nepal are a profound warning for Pakistan. For years, Pakistan has been among the countries most exposed to the climate crisis in South Asia, and we have already witnessed what a warming Himalaya can do — from the catastrophic 2022 floods, to increasingly frequent glacial lake outburst floods in Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The Nepal disaster tells us that we may be entering an even more dangerous phase of the Himalayan climate crisis.

But for me, there is a much deeper question here. South Asia shares a history. We share the history of colonial extraction, of loot and plunder, of resources being taken from our lands to build wealth elsewhere. Political decolonisation did not necessarily mean economic decolonisation. The geography of extraction has changed, the language has changed, but the underlying relationship can remain remarkably familiar.

Today, we are being told that the answer is development, investment, critical minerals, energy security and even the green transition. But we have to ask: whose development, whose energy security and whose transition?

Climate change cannot be reduced to mining alone. But it would be deeply irresponsible to pursue accelerated extraction in an already climate-vulnerable Himalayan region without asking what extraction does to fragile ecosystems, watersheds, communities and the cumulative resilience of the region.

And this is where the history of colonialism matters. We cannot keep repeating the old colonial bargain under a new vocabulary: our mountains provide the minerals, our communities bear the ecological and social costs and the value is extracted into global markets elsewhere.

If the Global North needs minerals for its energy transition, then the question must be: Who owns them? Who decides? Who benefits? Who bears the environmental costs? And what happens to the people and ecosystems from which these resources are extracted?

We cannot continue with an economic model that treats our mountains, minerals, rivers and land as commodities.

We cannot call it a green transition if the transition is built on another round of extraction from the Global South. We cannot decolonise our politics while continuing to colonise our resources. And we cannot keep asking the people of Pakistan to pay the climate price for a development model from which they receive so little of the wealth.

For Pakistan, the lesson from Nepal is therefore not simply to prepare better for floods.

If extraction continues without ecological limits, democratic control and justice — and if the old unequal relationship between the Global North and resource-rich countries of the Global South continues under the language of “green development” — then the next disaster will not be a surprise. It will be a consequence of choices we already made.

Many years ago, we took part in an international campaign for the release of Baba Jan from Gilgit-Baltistan, who was dubbed the “first climate justice political prisoner”. How does the mounting ecological crisis impact repression and human rights?

The struggle is not only about environmental protection, but about who has the right to speak, whose land is protected, whose losses are recognised, and whether climate-affected communities are allowed to demand justice.

For me, the story of Baba Jan is one of the clearest examples of what climate politics looks like in Pakistan when it becomes a question of justice, rather than simply a question of climate change. And this tells us something very important about the space available to the left in Pakistan.

We are allowed to talk about climate change. We are allowed to talk about floods, melting glaciers, carbon emissions and resilience. But when we start talking about climate justice — about land, ownership, displacement, workers’ rights, resource extraction, reparations and who is responsible — the conversation becomes much more politically uncomfortable.

That is where the climate crisis intersects with repression.

Baba Jan was not simply asking for disaster relief. He was asking: what does justice mean for people whose homes and livelihoods have been destroyed? Who owns the land? Who decides what happens to displaced communities? Why should people who have contributed so little to the climate crisis carry its costs? When those questions become political, the space for dissent becomes much narrower.

This is also why the mounting ecological crisis creates both a challenge and an opportunity for left-wing politics in Pakistan. The crisis is making visible the inequalities that the left has been talking about for decades: class, land, labour, gender, displacement, resource extraction and the unequal distribution of wealth and risk. Climate change is not creating these inequalities from nothing; it is intensifying them.

But the women living through these crises are the most severely affected but very often the least heard in the political response. They lose homes, livelihoods, access to water and food; they take on more unpaid care work; they face greater insecurity and violence — and then they are expected to remain grateful for whatever relief reaches them. That is not climate justice.

And this is where I find the language of “green transition” inadequate. Governments and industry are increasingly comfortable talking about green growth, renewable energy, green jobs and transition. But where is the “just transition” that was talked about?

A transition cannot be considered just if a worker loses their livelihood in the process. It cannot be just if mining communities lose their land so that corporations elsewhere can secure the minerals required for a “green economy.” It cannot be just if women absorb the additional unpaid care burden. And it cannot be just if the people most affected by climate disasters have no meaningful voice in deciding what happens to their communities.

A green transition without workers’ rights, land rights and democratic participation can simply become another form of extraction.

So I think the role of the left is not simply to demand that Pakistan “adapt” to climate change.

The left has to ask: adapt for whom? Transition for whom? Green growth for whom? And who pays?

Because if we silence the people whose land is being taken, if we criminalise those who demand compensation, if we exclude women from decision-making, if workers are asked to sacrifice their livelihoods in the name of transition and if climate finance does not reach affected communities — then we are not addressing the climate crisis. We are managing inequality through the climate crisis.

Baba Jan’s story therefore remains incredibly relevant. His struggle reminds us that climate justice in Pakistan has always been about political power. It is about whether communities have the right to demand accountability from the state, from industry and from those who profit from extraction.

And perhaps that is the challenging lesson for the left: the climate crisis is not only an environmental crisis waiting to be solved. It is becoming a profound struggle over land, labour, resources, democracy and survival.

If we cannot create political space for the people who are already living through the crisis to speak, then the people most responsible for creating the crisis will continue to speak for them.

Specifically, what does this mean for women workers and peasants?

Women workers across Pakistan — including women peasants working on the land, home-based workers, domestic workers and women employed in the garment and textile industry — continue to work under deeply precarious conditions. Their labour is often invisible, undervalued and poorly protected, with unequal wages, limited social protection, insecure employment and little control over the conditions in which they work.

For peasant women and women working in brick kilns, there can also be a profound loss of control over the wages they earn. Women may perform the labour, but the income is often controlled or received by men within the household. Their labour therefore does not automatically translate into economic autonomy or bargaining power.

The burden becomes even heavier when we look at it through the lens of the debt and economic crisis. Women are not only workers; they are also carrying the unpaid burden of keeping households alive — managing food, children, healthcare, education and household survival when wages are insufficient and public services are cut back. Debt and austerity are therefore deeply gendered. What appears as an economic crisis at the macro level is experienced by women through longer working hours, greater unpaid care work, indebtedness and greater insecurity.

This is why we need gender-just tax and fiscal policies. We cannot continue asking working-class women to pay the price for an economic crisis they did not create. Tax systems must place a greater burden on wealth, corporate profits and those with the greatest capacity to pay, while public spending must prioritise social protection, healthcare, education, decent work, childcare and essential services.

A gender-just fiscal system should recognise women’s labour, not treat it as an invisible resource that can endlessly absorb the shocks of economic and climate crises. Women should not have to work more, borrow more and care more simply to survive.