Why Pakistan’s Flood Warning System Fails When It Matters Most

A recent Dawn editorial rightly warns that Pakistan can no longer treat each flood or weather disaster as an unpredictable tragedy. With extreme weather now frequent and severe, the real failure is not forecasting but how early warnings are ignored, drainage channels stay blocked by encroachments, and local authorities remain too weak to act.

Pakistan has at least five major agencies for disaster monitoring and response: SUPARCO, the Meteorological Department (PMD), the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), Provincial Disaster Management Authorities (PDMAs), and District DDMAs. SUPARCO collects satellite data, PMD analyses it with global weather feeds and field reports, and sends forecasts to NDMA, PDMAs, DDMAs, and the media. NDMA coordinates national response, while PDMAs and DDMAs are supposed to handle local action.

On paper, the system should work. In reality, each crisis reveals the same gaps. On 26 June 2025, NDMA issued a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) warning for vulnerable areas in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan. Yet on 27 June, a sudden surge in the Swat River swept away 17 tourists. Fourteen drowned while waiting for official help; only three survived, rescued by two local volunteers.

NDMA alerts often read like forecasts, not instructions. The July alert named whole provinces but didn’t say how much rain, which rivers to watch, or which villages to evacuate. A real warning would say: “200 mm rain likely in Swat, Lehri Nullah may overflow by 2 July afternoon — evacuate low-lying villages now.”

Without clear local instructions, villagers do not know when to flee. Rescue teams come unprepared — as in Swat, where rescuers brought a rope too short to reach victims. NDMA and PDMAs have contingency plans — but these sit buried in PDFs, untested and unread.

Since 2000, Pakistan has suffered repeated floods and GLOFs — from Chitral to Swat to Hunza — as reflected in the following table:

(Source: NDMA, PDMA, UNDP, ICIMOD)

Despite launching the $37 million GLOF-II project in 2017, with new gauges, sirens, and local training, no real-time link connects “human sensors” in villages to official rescue teams.

Technology alone won’t save lives if SOPs sit buried, rescue checklists gather dust, and trust is missing on the ground

Contrast this with Nepal: there, local committees issue instant alerts by siren, SMS, radio, or mosque loudspeakers. Villagers know when to move and how to respond — zero GLOF deaths in 2023, despite having more glacial lakes than Pakistan.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s disaster plan remains stuck. SUPARCO watches from satellites, the PMD issues rainfall updates, and the NDMA sends vague alerts — but glacier bursts still catch villages unprepared because these alerts give forecasts, not clear instructions for people or rescue teams.

Pakistan has just six Urban Search & Rescue teams for the whole country — around 700 people. Punjab’s PDMA has 100 rescue staff; Sindh, Balochistan, KP have few or none recorded. A new batch of 234 rescuers mostly went to Punjab, while flood-prone KP got just 37.

PMD’s monitoring is equally skewed: Punjab and Islamabad together have nearly 100 observatories and over 2,000 staff. Gilgit-Baltistan and AJK — ground zero for glacial floods — have just 13 observatories and about 130 people. This leaves massive blind spots.

PMD’s manpower shows similar gaps:

Why keep so many overlapping layers — NDMA, PDMAs, DDMAs — when PMD already has a network and decades of expertise? Why does Islamabad alone have as many observatories as all Punjab, while flood-prone regions together have fewer than Punjab and ICT combined? Whose safety does this system protect?

Approximate fatalities from major floods combined — 2000–2023:

Flood & Rain-Related Property Damage in Pakistan (2020–2023):

These figures paint a grim picture: Sindh, Balochistan, KP, and AJK have lost far more lives than Punjab and GB combined. Property damage shows the same pattern — Sindh alone saw 2.3 million houses damaged in just three years.

Floods start in KP, GB, and Balochistan — heavy rainfall and glacier melt surge downstream. If upstream monitoring fails, downstream warnings come too late. Yet Islamabad and Punjab hold the bulk of monitoring centres and staff. The real need is more labs in mountains, better-trained local rescuers, and clear evacuation drills.

PDMAs and DDMAs are provincial, but NDMA and PMD are federal. Two root causes weaken our response: monitoring is weakest where it’s needed most, and NDMA’s alerts rarely reach communities as trusted, actionable instructions.

Unfortunately, NDMA and PMD’s footprint stays tilted toward urban centres like Islamabad and Punjab, instead of matching resources to where floods strike first.

Environmental forecasting is difficult, and Pakistan is not alone in these failures. The recent Texas floods exposed similar gaps. The initial U.S. forecast on 2 July predicted moderate rainfall of 6–8 inches; by the night of 3 July and early 4 July, it had escalated to 15–19 inches in just hours, overwhelming real-time forecasting already strained by staff shortages.

Pakistan’s PMD faces the same gaps: low manpower, especially in northern flood zones, and centralised expertise that slows local response. Both countries struggle with limited real-time data and sparse monitoring. Critically, neither has reliable local alert systems — no flood sirens in Texas despite years of debate, and minimal sirens or mosque loudspeakers in Pakistan, leaving communities unwarned.

These parallels prove forecasts alone are not enough; strong staffing, local monitoring, and working sirens are what turn data into life-saving action.

Technology alone won’t save lives if SOPs sit buried, rescue checklists gather dust, and trust is missing on the ground. After two decades of floods and broken promises, the question remains: why do over 3,000 staff and overlapping agencies still fail when people need them most? Only the state can answer — if it ever chooses to.