Population growth is outpacing Pakistan’s ability to adapt to a climate-stressed, resource-limited world

Pakistan is racing toward a demographic milestone that is likely to rob the next generation of a future. As the country crosses the quarter-billion mark, a stark mismatch is forming between an exploding demand for essentials and a shrinking natural base that supplies them.  When demand grows faster than what land, water, and climate can support, the potential of a demographic dividend becomes a demographic emergency.

Pakistan is unusually young, with a median age of 20.6 years, and roughly two-thirds of its population is under the age of 30. Millions of Gen Z (born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s) are entering adulthood amid the sharpest resource squeeze in the country’s history. This is not a distant-future problem. It is already visible in water taps that run dry, crops that fail under erratic weather, and job markets that shut out millions of educated youths.

The water crunch is behind every crisis, making it perhaps the most urgent indicator of imbalance.  Per-capita water availability has plunged from abundance at independence to well below global scarcity thresholds, putting severe constraints on irrigation, industry and household use.

The Indus Basin — the backbone of our agriculture and food security — is overstretched even in normal years. Add a bad monsoon or extended drought, and entire farming districts can tip into crisis.

Every weakness in Pakistan’s resource base is being magnified by climate change. The 2022 floods, which displaced millions and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage, proved how quickly decades of development can evaporate with one stroke of nature.

Heatwaves are becoming longer and deadlier; rainfall patterns are turning increasingly erratic; and glacier melt is threatening both seasonal water flows and long-term storage. This makes climate change not just an environmental but a national security risk. It accelerates the breakdown of infrastructure, pushes households into debt, disrupts schooling, and erodes the productive capacity of entire regions. And it is Gen Z that will pay the steepest price, with disrupted education, uncertain employment, and a lifetime of lower earning.

A resource-strained future has profound social consequences. When demand outstrips supply, society frays. Households forced to choose between food, school fees and medical bills inevitably pull girls out of classrooms first. Young men facing long-term unemployment are more vulnerable to recruitment into criminal or extremist networks. Mental-health stress spikes when economic hopelessness becomes a way of life.

The political implications are equally severe. Urban migration is swelling informal settlements faster than local governments can respond. Competition over water between provinces, cities, farmers and industries is already triggering disputes that weaken national cohesion. A generation raised with smartphones but without opportunities is a generation primed for political volatility.

Gen Z is both the face of the crisis and the key to its solution. Their aspirations for decent work, stable housing, and quality public services are colliding with hard ecological limits. If Pakistan fails to create pathways for youth inclusion in a resource-constrained economy, the result will not just be economic stagnation. It will be a legitimacy crisis for the state itself.

The country needs to climate-proof its future with resilient infrastructure, water governance reform, food security and green/ digital job creation, but the state cannot make this happen if the demand keeps growing beyond its response capacity. The moment demands political courage and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths: our institutions weren’t designed for 255 million people, and our policies still assume natural abundance that no longer exists.

The road ahead is difficult but not impossible. Gen Z can play a major role in advocating for smaller families to protect its own future by investing in quality over quantity. Every child, irrespective of gender, deserves a decent life. The state must step forward to play its role in ensuring equitable distribution of resources by revisiting the criteria for the National Finance Commission (NFC) award and bringing critical subjects such as population, education, health and climate back into the federal legislative list.

The common denominator of resilience and prosperity in the developed world is a combination of a smaller population, higher productivity and plentiful resources. Pakistan is a study in contrast to this formula.

The demographic dilemma is not only about the arithmetic of people versus resources; it is the political economy of who wins and who loses as the arithmetic tightens. The cost of a rapidly growing, unusually young population with a shrinking per capita water supply and recurrent disasters will take the heaviest toll on the largest cohort (youth), and the country will have to pay an exorbitant social, economic and political cost of this imbalance for decades.

Pakistan’s growing population is not the problem. The problem is the gap between how quickly we are expanding and how slowly we are adapting to a climate-stressed, resource-limited world. If the country does not correct this course, the generation that should have powered its rise will instead be the generation that inherits its decline.

The window of opportunity is narrowing but has not yet closed. Pakistan can still convert its youth bulge into a national strength. We need to move beyond slogans towards a strategy that will ensure not just future survival but also a promise of life with dignity for all its citizens.

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The writer is the chief executive of the Civil Society Coalition for Climate Change.

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