Romina Khurshid Alam: Biography, Political Career and Her Role in Pakistan’s Climate Policy (2026)

Who is Romina Khurshid Alam?

Here is the plain truth about most members of Parliament: the public never hears of them. They do not shout on talk shows. They work in committees, attend conferences and write reports.

Romina Khurshid Alam is one of that quieter kind. She has never fought a constituency election. She entered the National Assembly on her party’s list in 2013 and has been returned twice since.

Over those years she built a speciality. While others chased ministries, she made herself the party’s person on the Sustainable Development Goals and, later, on climate change. In 2024 that work brought her a post beside the Prime Minister.

Romina Khurshid Alam’s career shows a different route to influence in Parliament: pick a subject few colleagues care about, learn it well and wait for it to matter.

Early life

She was born on 18 July 1976 in Gujranwala, according to her public biography. Gujranwala is an industrial city north of Lahore and a stronghold of the PML-N.

Her National Assembly profile gives the name Wilson Khurshid Alam in the field that records a member’s father or husband.

Little else about her early life or her education is on the public record. We do not fill the gap with guesses.

Three terms on a reserved seat

To be chosen three times in a row is a sign of standing inside the party. The list is drawn up by the leadership, and places on it are keenly sought.

How do reserved seats work?

• The Constitution sets aside 60 seats for women in the National Assembly, divided among the provinces.
• Before an election, each party gives the Election Commission a ranked list of women for each province.
• After the election, the seats are shared out in line with the general seats each party has won there.
• The women at the top of each party’s list take the seats.

A member on a reserved seat has the same vote, pay and rights as any other member. What she lacks is a constituency of her own. That can be a weakness, because she depends on the party leadership. It can also be a strength, because she has time for policy work that a constituency member, busy with local demands, does not.

The Sustainable Development Goals

Her first speciality was the Sustainable Development Goals, often shortened to SDGs.

What are they?

In 2015 every member country of the United Nations agreed on 17 goals to be met by 2030. They cover the basics of a decent life.

Pakistan’s Parliament was one of the first in the world to adopt the goals as its own national agenda and to set up a special unit and a task force to follow them.

She became one of the leading figures in that parliamentary effort and went on to head its task force. The work is unglamorous: collecting data from ministries, asking why targets are being missed, holding sessions with provincial members. But it gave her a wide knowledge of how government performs, and it brought her into contact with United Nations agencies, donors and parliaments abroad.

Climate action is Goal 13. Her move from the goals in general to climate in particular was a natural step.

April 2024: Coordinator to the Prime Minister

After the election of February 2024, Shehbaz Sharif formed a coalition government. He did not at first name a full minister for climate change. Instead, a cabinet notice dated 3 April 2024 named her Coordinator to the Prime Minister on Climate Change and Environmental Coordination.

A government press release five days later shows her receiving the congratulations of a foreign ambassador and discussing plans for the year’s climate summit.

She followed a well-known predecessor. Senator Sherry Rehman of the PPP had led the ministry from 2022 to 2023 and had won international praise at the COP27 summit.

What is a “coordinator”?

This title confuses many readers, so here is how the posts compare.

A coordinator, then, is the lightest of these posts. She did not run the climate ministry in law. Its formal decisions were taken in the name of the Prime Minister, who kept the portfolio, and carried out by the ministry’s civil servants.

She has been open about this. In an interview before COP29 she described the role as advisory and facilitative: she could influence and coordinate, while ministries and departments carried out policy and controlled the money.

COP29: Baku, November 2024

Her biggest moment on the world stage was the COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November 2024. She attended as the Prime Minister’s coordinator on climate change.

What was at stake?

COP29 was called the “finance COP”. The main question was how much money rich countries would provide each year to help poorer ones cut emissions and cope with a changing climate.

• Developing countries asked for more than a trillion dollars a year.
• The summit ended with a promise that rich countries would lead in providing at least 300 billion dollars a year by 2035.
• Many developing countries, Pakistan among them, said this was far too little and that too much of it would come as loans.

Pakistan’s position, which she set out in interviews and speeches, was that a country which has done little to cause the problem should not have to borrow to repair the damage.

How does a climate summit work?

A COP lasts about two weeks and has three layers.

1. The leaders’ days. Presidents and prime ministers fly in at the start, make speeches and leave.
2. The negotiations. Officials from nearly two hundred countries then argue, line by line, over the text of the final decisions. Every country must agree, so talks often run through the last night.
3. The pavilions. Around the meeting halls, each country sets up a stall where it holds talks, shows its projects and meets donors.

Small and poor countries cannot follow every negotiating room at once, so they work in blocs. Pakistan negotiates as part of the group of developing countries and of the group of countries most at risk. A coordinator’s job at a summit is to keep the delegation’s message consistent across all three layers.

Who does what on climate in Pakistan?

To judge any climate office-holder fairly, you need to know how scattered the responsibility is.

Since a constitutional amendment in 2010, the environment has been mainly a provincial subject. The federal climate ministry is small. Its budget is tiny beside those of ministries such as power or defence. It can write a fine policy, but it cannot order a province to plant a tree or move a village out of a flood plain.

That is the setting in which she worked. Any coordinator or minister in this field has a loud international platform and very little direct power at home.

What she did in the post

The record available for this article shows a steady round of official work.

• Meetings with partners. In December 2024 she met the World Bank’s country director. An earlier press release shows a meeting with a foreign ambassador days after her appointment.
• Speaking for Pakistan. She appeared at conferences at home and abroad to argue the case for climate finance.
• Outreach. In August 2025 the state news agency showed her speaking to a group of visiting students.

This is the normal work of the job. No single large policy can be credited to her alone, and given the limits of the post it would be unfair to expect one.

A change in 2025

In 2025 the Prime Minister reshuffled his cabinet and appointed a full Federal Minister for Climate Change. A report from February 2026 names that minister in the post.

What this meant for her role is not clear from the sources read for this article. Reports show her still acting as coordinator in August 2025. Nothing dated 2026 was found. She remains a member of the National Assembly.

So the honest summary is this: she was appointed coordinator in April 2024; she held the post through 2025; whether she holds it today is not confirmed.

Why climate matters so much for Pakistan

Pakistan produces less than one per cent of the world’s heat-trapping gases. It is regularly ranked among the countries most harmed by them.

Three tests for any climate office-holder

Whoever holds the post, the same three questions show whether the work is real.

1. Is the budget growing or shrinking? A government that cuts the climate ministry’s funds each year is telling you its priorities.
2. Is money from abroad arriving as grants or as loans? And is it reaching the districts that were flooded?
3. Are the provinces on board? Since they hold most of the powers, a federal plan without them is only paper.

What supporters and critics say

Supporters describe a hard-working member who has stuck with dull but important subjects for more than a decade. They say she is well regarded by international partners and that she kept Pakistan’s voice heard after a famous predecessor left.

Critics make several points. Some say the coordinator’s post was a way of avoiding the appointment of a proper minister, and that it left climate policy without real leadership for a year. Environmental groups say the government’s actions at home, on coal, on forests and on city planning, do not match its speeches abroad. And critics of reserved seats in general note that she owes her place to the party’s list, not to voters.

Each view has merit. She did the job she was given. Whether that job was designed to achieve much is a fair question, and it is a question for the Prime Minister who designed it.

Words you will hear

Timeline: Romina Khurshid Alam at a glance

Why her story matters

• It shows the value of specialising. Parliament needs members who know one subject deeply. There are too few of them.
• It shows how titles can mislead. “Coordinator” sounds grand. In law it is the lightest post in the government.
• It shows where climate policy really gets stuck. The problem is rarely a lack of speeches. It is that the people who speak do not control the budget, and the people who control the budget have other priorities.

For background, read our explainer on the National Assembly and our plain-English guide to Pakistan’s politics.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• National Assembly of Pakistan, member profile: Romina Khurshid Alam — read on 8 October 2026.
• Cabinet Division, latest news — notice of 3 April 2024 on her appointment.
• Press Information Department, press release on her meeting with the Ethiopian ambassador — 8 April 2024.
• Wikipedia, “Romina Khurshid Alam” — as last edited on 27 March 2026; used for her date of birth and earlier terms only.
• Dialogue Earth, “‘Passivity accomplishes nothing’: Pakistan’s climate coordinator on the country’s COP29 strategy” — interview, 2024.
• Sustainable Development Policy Institute, speaker profile
• Ministry of Climate Change and Environmental Coordination