Pakistan’s Poor Face a Double Blow as Floods Return: Study
Nadeem Tanoli
ISLAMABAD: For Pakistan’s poorer communities, surviving a devastating flood is often only the beginning of the crisis. A new study has found that low-wealth areas suffered greater damage and experienced slower, less stable recovery from the 2022 and 2025 floods, with repeated flooding leaving many communities struggling to rebuild what they had already lost.
The study, “Flood recovery inequality in Pakistan: Evidence from the 2022 and 2025 monsoon floods using satellite data and relative wealth index,” found that existing inequalities in wealth, infrastructure and access to resources strongly shaped how communities experienced flooding and recovered afterwards.
Conducted by Sughra, Siriporn Darnkachatarn and Yoshio Kajitani and published in ‘Environmental and Sustainability Indicators’, the research examined flood impacts across Pakistan using satellite-based measurements of nighttime lights, vegetation and population exposure, alongside a Relative Wealth Index.
The researchers analysed 85,533 grid cells covering the country, with each cell averaging about 4.4 square kilometres. Of these, 15,794 heavily flooded areas were compared with similar non-flooded locations.
For poorer communities, the findings point to a cycle in which limited resources make it harder to absorb an initial disaster—and a second flood can arrive before recovery is complete.
The 2022 floods, described by the researchers as the most severe in Pakistan’s recorded history, affected 33 million people, killed 1,739 and damaged or destroyed around 1.7 million homes. Agricultural losses alone were estimated at more than $3.7 billion.
Before many affected communities had fully rebuilt their homes, livelihoods and assets, the 2025 monsoon brought another major flood event. The study says about 6.9 million people were affected and around three million displaced. In Punjab, approximately 1.12 million hectares of crops were submerged, while about 230,000 homes and 4,700 villages were inundated.
The researchers found that the initial damage from the 2022 floods was particularly severe for vegetation. Flooded areas experienced about 29 percentage points more vegetation loss than comparable non-flooded areas, with especially severe impacts recorded in agricultural parts of Sindh and Balochistan.
About 37.3 per cent of the population in flooded grid cells was directly exposed to inundation in 2022, according to the study. The researchers clarified that this figure represents population exposure rather than a separate estimate of the causal effect of flooding.
Economic activity, measured through nighttime light intensity, also declined in flooded areas in 2022. However, the researchers cautioned that nighttime lights may not fully capture losses in rural and low-income farming communities, where economic activity is naturally less visible from space.
There were signs of recovery in subsequent years. Compared with matched areas, nighttime-light growth was 2.904 percentage points higher in 2023 and 4.035 percentage points higher in 2024.
But the researchers cautioned that these figures cannot be interpreted simply as evidence that the floods directly caused the subsequent changes, because affected and comparison areas were already following different trends before 2022.
Then came the 2025 floods.
The year-to-year change in nighttime-light growth from 2024 to 2025 fell by 1.54 percentage points under the main comparison and by 2.31 percentage points when areas that had remained flood-free in both years were used as controls. A separate analysis estimated the 2025 flood-related reduction at between 2.12 and 2.86 percentage points.
Vegetation recovered somewhat faster than economic activity. By April 2023, flooded areas had recovered to 80 per cent of their earlier vegetation level at a rate 3.644 percentage points higher than matched controls. The difference remained positive through October 2023, April 2024 and October 2024.
The 2025 floods, however, erased part of that progress, producing another 10.902 percentage points of vegetation loss.
Poverty deepens gap
The study found a consistent relationship between wealth and recovery: poorer areas generally experienced larger negative impacts or smaller improvements than wealthier areas.
The relationship between wealth and the 2022 impact was statistically significant, with a Spearman correlation of 0.167. Although the correlation declined to 0.060 in 2023, 0.071 in 2024 and 0.081 in 2025, the researchers said the overall ordering of wealth groups remained similar.
The researchers identified several factors that may make recovery harder for poorer communities, including limited access to formal finance and credit, greater dependence on agriculture, weaker housing and reduced access to targeted support.
After one disaster, families may use whatever savings, livestock, equipment or other assets remain to rebuild. When another flood strikes before that recovery is complete, those remaining resources can be exhausted once again.
The researchers describe this process as cumulative vulnerability.
About 12.4 per cent of all grid cells examined—10,637 cells—were affected by both the 2022 and 2025 floods. These repeatedly affected areas were concentrated largely in the lower Indus basin in Sindh.
The study found that repeated flooding disrupted recovery and produced cumulative effects rather than simply creating two separate episodes of damage.
Difficult recovery Case of Sindh
The provincial findings show sharply different recovery patterns.
Punjab recorded a relatively strong recovery in nighttime-light activity, with the measured effect rising from 3.3 percentage points in 2022 to 10.0 percentage points by 2024. Agricultural recovery was also relatively stable.
The researchers suggested that stronger infrastructure, higher wealth and greater institutional capacity may have contributed to this pattern, while stressing that these explanations were not directly proven by the study.
Sindh presented a much weaker picture. Its nighttime-light measure showed a negative 6.2 percentage point impact in 2022, followed by little recovery in 2023 and further negative results in 2024 and 2025.
Sindh also recorded the country’s highest population exposure in the study and a 52.4 percentage point vegetation-loss measure in 2022.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa showed another contrast. Its nighttime-light measure declined from negative 1.3 percentage points in 2022 to negative 7.1 percentage points in 2025, while vegetation recovery remained strongly positive at between 13.7 and 13.8 percentage points.
The researchers said the contrast illustrates how natural vegetation can recover faster than economic activity, which depends more heavily on infrastructure, transport, markets and formal employment.
Balochistan experienced a delayed but continuing decline in nighttime-light activity. Its result was almost unchanged in 2022 but fell to negative 4.0 percentage points in 2024 and negative 4.4 percentage points in 2025.
The province recorded the largest vegetation-loss measure in 2022 at 66.0 percentage points and continued to show negative vegetation recovery results. The researchers pointed to the province’s dry climate, fragile soils and limited irrigation as possible explanations.
Repeated exposure
The study identified Kambar Shahdad Kot, Jacobabad, Kashmore, Larkana, Dadu and Shikarpur as low-wealth districts in the lower Indus corridor that have experienced repeated flooding and may require targeted recovery and resilience investment.
The researchers recommended preparing disaster financing in advance and investing in infrastructure capable of shortening recovery periods.
They also called for flood recovery to be monitored through multiple satellite indicators instead of relying solely on economic activity. Vegetation data and the Relative Wealth Index, they said, can help identify communities that face greater losses and slower recovery.
The researchers nevertheless cautioned against treating the findings as definitive proof that flooding directly caused every measured difference. Because flooded and non-flooded areas had different trends before 2022, the study describes its findings as covariate-adjusted associations.
They also noted that nighttime-light data can understate agricultural losses and that estimates for the 2025 floods remain provisional until more official post-disaster information becomes available.
The researchers concluded that flood impacts in Pakistan are shaped not only by where water reaches but also by who has the resources to recover. For poorer communities, a second flood before the first recovery is complete can turn a disaster into a prolonged cycle of loss and vulnerability.
They suggested that future research combining satellite observations with household surveys could provide a clearer picture of how repeated flooding affects families and livelihoods at the individual level.
