Climate Change Has Arrived Is Pakistan Ready?

Shazia Mehboob

Islamabad: Pakistan is once again submerged—literally and politically—in the wreckage of a disastrous monsoon season. Since late June 2025, devastating floods have displaced millions of citizens, destroyed infrastructure, and unleashed cascading public health crises.

Punjab has been the hardest hit, as the Chenab, Sutlej, and Ravi rivers overflowed, inundating thousands of villages. Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Sindh are bracing for similar calamities, with Sindh already on high alert for a potential super flood.

Nearly six million people have been directly affected, with close to a thousand lives lost, hundreds of thousands of acres of land submerged, thousands of homes and livestock destroyed, and hundreds of bridges and roads washed away.

The real tragedy, however, lies not only in the destruction but in the predictability of this disaster, and in the failure to learn lessons from the “once-in-a-century” floods of 2010 and the catastrophic deluge of 2022.

According to Rapid Needs Assessments (RNA) and reports from Provincial Disaster Management Authorities (PDMAs), nearly 5.8 million people have been affected by the current floods—4.2 million in Punjab and 1.6 million in KP.

Sindh has identified an additional 1.6 million residents at risk. The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has reported 932 fatalities, the destruction of 8,217 houses, the loss of 6,508 livestock, and damage to 239 bridges and more than 670 kilometers of roads.

These figures highlight the immense scale of the disaster and underscore Pakistan’s vulnerability to climate-induced hazards, which represent not only humanitarian and developmental setbacks but also a growing non-traditional security threat with potential external implications.

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Beyond statistics, the floods reveal a recurring governance failure. Each monsoon season exposes Pakistan’s disaster management framework as reactive, fragmented, and short-sighted. Federal and provincial political representatives visit inundated districts, conduct aerial surveys, and issue statements on relief and rehabilitation, but once waters recede, these commitments disappear from policy agendas.

Relief camps and rescue operations are promptly set up, yet the structural deficiencies persist. Pakistan has effectively institutionalized short-termism: repeated assessments, often limited by inadequate humanitarian access in remote areas, consistently identify the same challenge of chronic unpreparedness.

This governance weakness has been aggravated by the institutional changes following the 18th Constitutional Amendment, which devolved significant powers to provincial governments. Coordination between provincial and federal institutions remains weak, with PDMAs lacking adequate resources and NDMA functioning more as an emergency responder than as an agency for long-term climate resilience.

The recurring cycle of “relief, rehabilitation, and forgetting” has become a defining feature of Pakistan’s disaster governance, with the military repeatedly called upon to assist civilian authorities in rescuing citizens and sheltering displaced families and livestock.

Health crises have further compounded the devastation. In KP, the floods coincided with a dengue outbreak in Charsadda. Stagnant floodwaters across multiple provinces have become breeding grounds for cholera and malaria, while damaged hospitals struggle to provide care under mounting strain.

International agencies have been compelled to step in, filling governance gaps that provincial institutions should have anticipated. Punjab and Sindh, facing escalating floods, are now at risk of similar public health emergencies.

International actors have pledged financial support. The European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, United Nations agencies, Saudi Arabia, and others have committed millions of dollars.

However, Pakistan’s damages are projected to run into billions, far beyond the scope of humanitarian aid. While international assistance remains vital, it cannot substitute for systemic and sustained climate finance.

This is especially urgent given Pakistan’s contribution of less than 1 percent to global greenhouse gas emissions, despite being consistently ranked among the world’s ten most climate-vulnerable countries.

Flooding in Multan other parts of South Punjab is thus not merely a natural calamity but a manifestation of global climate injustice, highlighting the responsibility of high-emission states to finance adaptation in vulnerable countries rather than restricting assistance to emergency relief.

The floods also expose a national security dimension that has long been overlooked. The devastation unfolding across Punjab, KP, Sindh, and Gilgit-Baltistan demonstrates how climate shocks can destabilize the state by undermining economic security, straining governance, and exacerbating political fragility.

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The crisis has been further complicated by India’s announcement of suspending the Indus Waters Treaty. If enforced, this decision, combined with accelerated glacial melt in the Himalayas and Karakoram ranges, could plunge Pakistan into cycles of prolonged droughts or catastrophic floods, with severe implications for water and food security.

Addressing such threats requires more than ad hoc measures; it demands a national security framework that explicitly recognizes climate change as an existential challenge on par with traditional security concerns.

While Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has declared a “climate and agriculture emergency,” such announcements risk remaining symbolic unless accompanied by structural reforms.

Pakistan urgently requires transparent disaster risk financing mechanisms, decentralized early warning systems, investment in climate-resilient infrastructure, and above all, political consensus that treats climate change as a survival issue rather than a partisan slogan.

Without these reforms, Pakistan risks remaining locked in a perpetual cycle of disaster and recovery, undermining both citizen welfare and national stability.

Ultimately, Pakistan cannot continue as a permanent victim of climate change disasters. International partners must scale up climate finance to support adaptation, while domestic leadership must break free from reactionary politics and crisis marketing.

Citizens deserve more than ration bags and rescue boats; they deserve policies that guarantee safety, dignity, and resilience.

Every submerged village, every displaced family, and every child battling disease in relief camps represents not just a statistic but a stark reminder that climate change is already here.

The central question is no longer whether Pakistan is vulnerable, but whether it will respond with resilience—or persist in repeating the failures of the past.

Shazia Mehboob is a PhD scholar and a visiting faculty member. She is also an investigative journalist and the founder of The PenPK.com. She tweets @thepenpk.