For many generations of Indus Basin inhabitants, the monsoon was a season of renewal. Its rains replenished rivers and nurtured crops, promising abundance and inspiring poetry, folk songs, and celebration. The first rains often carried hope. Today, they bring fear.
The monsoon of 2025 has once again highlighted this reversal. Over 842 lives have been lost; 1.2 million people displaced; and more than 4 million affected. These numbers only begin to capture the scale of the human toll. Economic losses are currently projected between $6 billion and $10 billion.
The country’s agriculture is reeling from devastation: cotton yields have been slashed by up to 30 percent and over 100,000 livestock wiped out. These figures are far from final; floodwater is still coursing through Sindh.
The current disaster is reminiscent of the 2022 floods, when nearly a third of the country was submerged, displacing 33 million people and claiming 1,700 lives. According to the World Bank, the damage was estimated at $14.9 billion, and the need for recovery and reconstruction at $16.3 billion.
Three years on, the pattern is unmistakable: we remain persistently vulnerable, trapped in a cycle where disaster strikes before recovery from the last one has been completed. The Prime Minister has declared a climate and agriculture emergency. This is a national challenge that goes beyond rescue and relief, demanding investments in prevention.
### The Making of a Crisis
Pakistan’s exposure to floods is not accidental. It is written into the land itself.
In the north, the highest mountain ranges on Earth hold the largest ice reserve outside the Arctic, now melting faster under a warmer climate. In the south, the snowmelt feeds the Indus River before flowing into low-lying coastal belts, where mangroves and tidal flats form a fragile defence for fishing communities against rising sea waters.
Across this landscape, millions have built cities, tilled fields, and forged livelihoods, relying on a river system that has long enabled life. Today, the geography is being pushed to its limits.
Monsoon rains—now heavier and more erratic—collide with steep mountains, swelling rivers and landscapes altered by human encroachment. With floodplains built over and urban drains choked, heavy rains now spill across cities and plains, trapping communities in an exhausting loop of loss and recovery where survival overshadows progress.
While we face genuine climate risks, the crisis has been worsened by longstanding institutional failures and poor policy decisions. Decisions about water management are sometimes influenced by political rivalries, elite capture, and short-term financial interests.
Housing schemes rise on floodplains and wetlands, and informal settlements expand along nullahs and natural drainage channels. Failures of governance are more visible in urban centres where choked drains, lack of stormwater management, outdated planning, and unchecked land use leave neighbourhoods in knee-deep water. Almost every year, the cities collapse into chaos and governments focus on relief rather than prevention.
### Fragile Reservoirs
Pakistan is also on the frontline of glacial change. Known as the Third Pole, Gilgit-Baltistan hosts over 7,000 glaciers that feed the Indus Basin and irrigate the country’s plains.
Rising temperatures—as high as 48 degrees Celsius at elevations above 4,000 feet—are destabilising this system. Himalayan glaciers are shrinking at an exceptionally high rate, giving rise to rapidly forming glacial lakes. In the past two decades alone, the number of lakes has grown by 25 percent.
At least 36 of those are classified as hazardous, holding the potential for outburst floods. Downstream, this quicker melting compounds monsoon floods.
### When Forests Fall, Floods Rise
While both the 2022 and 2025 floods were driven by extreme monsoon events, forest degradation, deforestation, and land cover transitions compounded their impact by weakening watersheds and stripping natural resilience.
The World Bank’s dataset suggests relatively stable or slightly increasing forest cover in Pakistan, but these indicators include plantations and tree cover outside natural forests. On the other hand, satellite-based Global Forest Watch has reported that from 2001 to 2023, between 9,000 and 10,000 hectares of tree cover loss was observed in Pakistan.
Against a baseline where natural forests accounted for barely 5 percent of the country’s land area, this loss is significant. The drivers are well known: fuel wood demand, illegal timber harvesting, encroachment on the floodplains, agricultural expansion, infrastructure projects, and increasingly, forest fires.
The consequences are equally evident. Global and regional reviews show strong links between deforestation and more frequent, more destructive floods—from increased surface runoff and higher peak discharges to shallow landslides, sediment flows that choke rivers, and the loss of natural slope stability and water regulation functions.
By eroding the country’s first line of defence, deforestation has turned extreme rains into disasters that forests could once have tempered.
### Refusing Inherited Vulnerabilities
The floodwaters will eventually recede. Communities will rebuild, markets will reopen, and a fragile sense of stability will return. But this return to normal is only temporary because the next disaster is already on its way, certain to arrive with the next cycle of rains or melt.
The solutions to Pakistan’s recurring flood crisis, while far from simple, are neither unknown nor impossible. For years, they have been clearly outlined, yet consistently sidelined as they struggle to find political traction.
What we are experiencing today is not only the consequence of climate extremes but also an inheritance of systemic inaction. Building resilience starts with functional local governance. Without empowered local institutions, the ability to prepare for floods and respond effectively will bypass the communities where disaster strikes.
The roadmap to recovery must begin by prioritising technical, human, and financial resources to manage risk and not just respond once a catastrophe has unfolded.
The natural buffers that soften the force of floods are equally vital. Wetlands, riparian forests, and floodplains act as sponges, absorbing water during peak rains. Restoring these systems through nature-based solutions—reforestation, wetland recovery, aquifer recharge, and riparian corridors—can protect both people and infrastructure.
These interventions must be embedded into the design of all future infrastructure and development projects. In fact, the “room for rivers” approach must be adopted for flood management, allowing rivers to safely carry and store excess water, reducing flood risks while restoring natural river dynamics.
Solutions must also address the way we build. Unless land use is guided by science and enforced through zoning, infrastructure itself will remain a source of risk.
During the floods, casualties can be traced back to construction along riverbeds and wetlands, from sprawling slums to luxury housing societies facing river views. A 2023 UN Habitat report warned that unplanned rapid rural-to-urban migration was driving this trend, yet encroachment on natural waterways continues to intensify.
The washed-out expressway in Karachi, built directly over a watercourse, is a stark reminder of what happens when concrete seeks to defy nature.
Pakistan must also invest in early warning systems that are not only technologically sound but also accessible to those most at risk. The households perched along riverbanks and floodplains, with the least capacity to absorb shocks, frequently remain excluded from planning processes that determine their survival.
Finally, nationwide flood risk mapping using satellite data can guide smarter land use planning, zoning regulations, and infrastructure design. Knowing where water will flow—including connections of main rivers with adjacent wetlands and depressions—and respecting those pathways can prevent the kind of destruction we continue to see in cities and villages alike.
Every washed-out road, collapsed bridge, and inundated settlement is a reminder that recovery efforts focused solely on relief are doomed to be washed away again.
Unless we immediately prioritise these long-discussed solutions, Pakistan will remain locked in a cycle where recovery focuses on relief and future generations inherit the same vulnerabilities we refused to resolve.
https://www.thenews.com.pk/tns/detail/1345061-failure-by-design