WATER AND CLIMATE JUSTICE

WORKSHOP 2024

The climate-related risks faced by South Asian societies are, above all, crises of water: its access, its scarcity, its unpredictability—and often all three simultaneously.

Long before the catastrophic floods of 2022, Pakistan has been home to innovative and influential ways of thinking about climate justice in relation to water. In his landmark 2015 judgement in Leghari v. Federation of Pakistan, Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah wrote: “Pakistan makes a tiny contribution to total global greenhouse gas emissions (among the lowest in the world), but it is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change,” and argued that creative and equitable approaches to water would have to be at the heart of Pakistan’s path to adaptation. LUMS has been innovative in generating new forms of data about water—a subject that has also been of interest across multiple schools at Yale, from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to the Schools of Architecture, Law, and Medicine.

This workshop will assemble a group of faculty from Yale and from LUMS, together with invited participants from other institutions in Pakistan to explore multiple dimensions of climate justice and injustice in relation to water.