Climate Change Perceptions and Policy Priorities in Pakistan: A Community Survey Analysis and Stratospheric Aerosol Injection Perspective

ABDUL HASEEB TANOLI, Shams ul Arfeen, Zeeshan Anwar, Yasir Abbas

Climate change constitutes a compound existential risk for Pakistan — a nation responsible for less than one percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions yet consistently ranked among the ten most climate-vulnerable states on earth (Germanwatch, 2021). Escalating heatwaves, intensifying monsoon floods, accelerating glacial retreat, chronic smog, and advancing desertification are not future projections for Pakistan: they are present, documented, and accumulating realities that claim lives, destroy crops, and destabilise livelihoods year after year. To assess community-level perceptions, lived impacts, and policy priorities, the PIEAS SAI Research Initiative administered a bilingual (English / Roman Urdu) structured survey instrument from 1 to 16 May 2026. A total of 1,149 valid, anonymised responses were obtained across all seven administrative regions: Punjab (37.5%), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (25.8%), Islamabad Capital Territory (21.1%), Sindh (7.0%), Azad Jammu and Kashmir (3.5%), Gilgit-Baltistan (2.3%), and Balochistan (2.7%). The sample comprised 852 general-public respondents and 297 domain professionals from engineering, natural sciences, and academia. Principal findings indicate that 90.6% of general-public respondents rated their climate-change awareness as Critical or Serious. Disruption to rainfall patterns ranked highest among six impact dimensions on a five-point Likert scale (mean = 3.91; SD = 1.1), followed by extreme heat-wave intensity (mean = 3.76; SD = 1.1) and agricultural stress (mean = 3.70; SD = 1.1). An aggregate 68.8% reported direct household or livelihood damage attributable to climate events. Afforestation and ecosystem restoration dominated government-priority preferences (65.1%), with water-resource management second (20.9%). This report documents the full survey findings, integrates triangulated secondary evidence for underrepresented regions, develops a thematic qualitative analysis, critically evaluates the limitations of community-preferred conventional solutions, and situates the survey evidence within the PIEAS SAI Research Initiative's broader scientific inquiry into Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) as a near-term, temporary geoengineering supplement — not replacement — to conventional emissions-reduction pathways