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Khyber Pakhtunkhwa doesn’t have a climate finance shortage. It has a sequencing problem, and its own budget documents make the case better than any outside critic could.
Over the past year, the provincial government has floated an unusually wide menu of ways to pay for climate adaptation: green sukuk, debt-for-climate swaps, payment-for-ecosystem-services schemes, climate-risk insurance, and carbon credits. The last got the most attention. In July 2025, Chief Minister Ali Amin Khan Gandapur unveiled the province’s first Forest Carbon Credit Mapping Report, projecting $4 billion in revenue over 40 years from ten forestry projects, with $100 million a year in the interim.
That figure is worth pausing on, because KP has made a version of this promise before. In 2023, the Forest Department and the Pakistan Forest Institute publicised a carbon credit project, first launched in 2014, projected to generate $140m a year. Nine years in, it was still described as being in its early stages.
Carbon markets are slow to convert mapping reports into paying contracts, and Pakistan has no track record of a forestry credit deal at this scale actually closing. That doesn’t make the new report worthless. It means a province that floated a large carbon figure once before, without result, should treat a second one as a supplement to its financing plan, not a foundation for it.
