Corporate Sustainability and Climate Action: Legal Perspectives on SDG Implementation in Pakistan's Energy Sector

Abstract

Pakistan's energy sector sits at the intersection of three of the most consequential legal developments in contemporary sustainable-development law: the Sustainable Development Goals framework, the international climate regime under the Paris Agreement, and the rapidly evolving domain of corporate sustainability disclosure. This article critically examines how these three domains have been translated into Pakistani law, from the constitutionally significant climate litigation of Leghari v Federation of Pakistan and the Climate Change Act 2017, through the Alternative and Renewable Energy Policy 2019 and Pakistan's successive Nationally Determined Contributions, to the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan's still-developing corporate ESG disclosure architecture. It updates this account to reflect Pakistan's Third Nationally Determined Contribution, submitted to the UNFCCC in September 2025, which commits to a fifty percent reduction in projected greenhouse gas emissions by 2035 at an estimated cost of USD 565.7 billion, and to reflect the Supreme Court of Pakistan's 2024 order compelling the long-delayed establishment of the Pakistan Climate Change Authority. The article also engages critically with the comparative European Union framework this literature typically treats as an aspirational benchmark, showing that the EU's own Corporate Sustainability Reporting and Due Diligence Directives were substantially narrowed by the Omnibus I Directive finalised in February 2026 — a retreat that complicates any simple account of Europe as a fixed regulatory ideal for Pakistan to emulate. The article argues that Pakistan's SDG-aligned legal architecture suffers less from an absence of formal commitment than from a persistent enforcement and institutional-coordination gap between climate policy, energy-sector regulation, and corporate accountability law, and proposes a sequenced reform agenda to close it.