Garbage trucks gather almost daily at Karachi’s Jam Chakro landfill, adding to heaps that have been rising for decades.
The 500-acre site sits roughly 30 kilometres from the city centre, one of only two landfills that receive Karachi’s official rubbish; far more of the city’s waste never gets even that far. Nobody knows exactly how many people work those heaps for a living, but by some estimates roughly 100,000 people in Karachi alone survive by sorting through it – without gloves, contracts or a fixed wage. Underneath the trash, unseen, methane seeps upward as the organic share of that waste rots without oxygen. In miniature, that landfill is both Pakistan’s garbage problem and its opportunity.
Six thousand kilometres away, at UN headquarters in New York on September 21, Turkiye put that same problem at the centre of global climate diplomacy for the first time. As COP31 host, Ankara has made zero waste and methane reduction its signature issue, one of ten priority themes and six measurable global targets the presidency unveiled that day. Pakistan’s Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb was in the room and pledged the country’s “full support” for the Action Agenda in its entirety. But when he named what mattered most to Islamabad, he listed clean energy and electrification, renewable power, efficient buildings, resilient cities, climate education, food security and agriculture. Waste was not on that list.
The COP31 Action Agenda sets two measurable targets for 2035: halve the projected growth in global municipal waste, and lift the global circular-material-use rate to at least 15 per cent. The presidency’s case, repeated by Turkish officials and demonstrated to visiting journalists at a waste-treatment plant outside Ankara this month, is that methane drives roughly 30 per cent of current warming, and that better waste management is one of the fastest, cheapest ways to bend that curve.
The science behind the urgency is straightforward: methane can trap up to 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year span, but it breaks down in the atmosphere within roughly a decade, so cutting it now buys the fastest near-term slowdown in warming available to any government. The waste sector itself produces only around 5.0 per cent of global emissions, but the return per dollar spent is unusually high precisely because so much of it is landfill methane rather than the centuries-lingering carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. Left as it is, the UN Environment Programme projects global municipal waste will rise from 2.1 billion tonnes today to 3.8 billion tonnes by 2050.
Pakistan’s numbers make the case just as clearly. Government estimates cited by the US Commercial Service put the country’s annual solid-waste output at approximately 50.79 million tons, rising steadily year on year, with more than 90,000 tons generated every week. Roughly half to three-fifths of that is organic, the fraction that turns into methane when dumped and left untreated. National per-capita generation runs at about 0.6 to 0.65 kilograms a day, but climbs past a kilogram in Karachi and Lahore. Karachi’s solid-waste board puts the city’s output at more than 14,800 tonnes a day, more, its managing director has said, than Mumbai, Delhi or Dhaka each generate.
Most of what is collected nationally, an estimated 70 to 80 per cent, still ends up openly dumped rather than in any engineered landfill. By the SDPI’s reading of the national greenhouse-gas inventory, the waste sector now accounts for roughly 8-9 per cent of Pakistan’s total emissions and close to a fifth of its methane. A waste stream this large, this fast-growing and this loosely governed, sitting almost untouched by climate policy, is precisely the gap COP31 wants closed.
NDC 3.0 commits the country to a 50 per cent cut against projected emissions, split between a 17 per cent unconditional share it must deliver regardless of outside help and a 33 per cent share conditional on international finance. Waste is one of the few sectors where Pakistan can make real headway on the unconditional side through its own governance and infrastructure, source separation, composting, landfill-gas capture, rather than waiting on the capital-intensive technology the energy transition needs. None of that requires reinventing anything; it requires municipalities to do consistently what a handful of pilot projects already do intermittently. That gives Islamabad a credible domestic action to carry into Antalya.
Pakistan does not have to start from nothing. Lahore’s Lakhodair landfill, running since 2016 and taking in some 5,000-5,500 tonnes a day on top of roughly 18 million tonnes already accumulated, is being developed as one of the country’s first Article 6 pilots under the German-backed SPAR6C programme, capturing landfill gas instead of venting it. Pakistan has already gone further at another Lahore site: the Mehmood Booti dumpsite has secured the government’s first-ever host-country approval under Article 6.2 and the voluntary carbon market, for an estimated 930,000-plus tonnes of verified credits between 2026 and 2040, backed by roughly Rs5 billion, about $18 million, for landfill-gas capture, leachate treatment, afforestation and solar power.
Karachi, the country’s largest source of municipal waste, has no comparable pilot yet. At Antalya, Pakistan should present the two Lahore projects not as isolated curiosities but as a model to scale, with Turkish technical assistance, into a joint Pakistan–Turkiye zero-waste and methane programme covering Karachi and one or two other cities.
One detail is uncomfortable, though: the same Mehmood Booti site now lined up for carbon revenue is home to dozens of waste pickers living in makeshift huts with no electricity or running water, sorting plastic, metal and paper by hand. Nationally, somewhere between 200,000 and over 330,000 people earn their living this way. In Lahore, researchers who once estimated 30,000 waste pickers now count more than 50,000, handling around two-fifths of the city’s entire waste stream. At an SDPI-hosted policy session on the sector earlier this year, the International Labour Organization called for a formal just-transition framework for exactly this workforce; that call should not be left sitting in a conference room.
Formalising and financing waste collection cannot mean formalising these people out of it. Article 6 credits from Pakistani landfill projects can only be called high-integrity if they are genuinely additional and properly counted against the national ledger, but integrity here has a social dimension as well as a carbon one; a credit that displaces a waste picker without replacing her income is not a clean transition, whatever the accounting says.
Pakistan will arrive at COP31 having already said yes to the zero-waste agenda in principle. Antalya is where that endorsement needs to turn into four specific commitments: naming waste as the near-term mitigation opportunity it already is; using it to deliver the unconditional slice of the NDC and thereby earn credibility for the finance still owed; turning Lakhodair and Mehmood Booti into an actual joint programme with Turkiye, extended to Karachi; and ensuring that whatever carbon revenue follows protects, rather than displaces, the people already doing this work.
None of this needs a new international fund or a breakthrough technology. It needs Pakistan to treat its own garbage as seriously as its own finance minister just told the world he would. Get that right, and the heaps at Jam Chakro become the cheapest climate win Pakistan currently has on the table.
Ihtesham Ul Haq is a researcher at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), Islamabad.
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