Author: admin

THE timing of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s lament that Pakistan has not drawn any lessons from previous climate-triggered disasters coincides with the launch of the 11th National Finance Commission on the distribution of resources between the federal and provincial governments.

Both exercises will need to converge on the local sources of Pakistan’s climate vulnerability and financing. The seesawing between the federation and provinces over the distribution of finances has cast a dark shadow over national climate and economic vulnerabilities. With the cost of reconstruction, development, debt and defence increasing, the resource trickle is dwindling further. Are there any lessons in the NFC awards to help respond to the PM’s lament?

Climate vulnerability at the district level has three basic drivers:

Population growth: In what constitutes Pakistan today, the population has exploded from 33.7 million in 1951 to 242.7m in 2025, and is projected to reach 380-403m by 2050, making it the world’s third most populous nation. This demographic explosion, coupled with economic stagnation and declining per capita income, creates escalating climate vulnerability.

Currently, 108m people, or 42.3 per cent of the population, according to a recent World Bank study, live below the poverty line with limited adaptive capacity.

Under business-as-usual scenarios, 190-200m people could be in poverty by 2050 — nearly half the projected population. In brief, every other child born in Pakistan will now be born to families below the poverty line — leaving them unable to afford climate adaptation and disaster recovery. This vast population spread in the high-risk areas of 169 districts with about 1,200 tehsils represents Pakistan’s most critical vulnerability driver.

Are there any lessons in the NFC awards to help respond to the PM’s lament?

Disproportionate exposure: The second key driver is the disproportionate concentration of the poor in high-risk areas. Data shows that in recent years, 18-26 districts have faced droughts in Balochistan and Sindh, 18 faced glacial lake outburst floods in Gilgit-Baltistan and KP, six faced tropical storms in Sindh and Balochistan and 84 districts were hit by floods across the provinces, not to mention urban flooding, forest fires, landslides and cloudbursts. Each district is exposed to two or more types of climate disasters.

The vulnerable populations are clustered in regions that are most susceptible to climate shocks, including low-lying floodplains, marginalised farmland and unauthorised settlements on riverbeds and urban peripheries. This geographical alignment guarantees that in the event of a climate disaster, the poor are hit first and the hardest, as their settlements are the most exposed and least resilient.

Limited adaptive capacity: Finally, low per capita income severely limits the adaptive capacity of our population. With a 2024 GDP per capita of just $1,485, and projections suggesting a decline to $1,200-$1,300 by 2050, the poor have virtually no financial buffer to absorb climate shocks.

The massive economic losses from climate events further drain resources, making it nearly impossible for individuals to invest in their assets: housing, livestock, standing crops, lives and microenterprises. This lack of financial capacity creates a vicious cycle of poverty and disaster.

Against this backdrop, what lessons can be drawn to respond to the PM’s remarks?

Incremental changes: Some answers by policy managers can be inferred: more resources for infrastructure to fill the financial gaps for recovery, reconstruction and rehabilitation from previous disasters; early warning systems; financing for the staggering 1,071 pending PC-1s; and upgradation of equipment or building new infrastructure. Other important elements include improved inter-agency cooperation, capacity-building, and access to international climate finance.

Many of these won’t be new lessons, but it is still important for each agency to develop and share its lessons. While these needs are necessary for government efficiency, where are the transformative lessons?

Transformative changes: Several initiatives remain trapped in approval processes: promoting land-use planning to guide human settlements away from low-lying flood-prone regions to designated safer areas; adaptive social protection to invest precious resources in damage prevention rather than post-disaster recovery; creation of sub-national disaster risk financing facilities; adoption of resilient construction standards; mandatory insurance for public sector infrastructure in PC-1 proposals; risk transfer and insurance mechanisms to prevent governments from harvesting unspent funds from development projects; and earnest implementation of climate risk screening for public sector portfolios.

The delays in their operationalisation and absence of prioritisation erode the synergistic impact necessary for transformative change. All of them, however, establish project-level, not policy-level, programmatic and strategic direction for our safe journey into the future.

Four transformative lessons: Pakistan’s climate adaptation demands structural governance transformation. Top-down interventions have failed to generate ownership. Globally, bottom-up initiatives by elected local governments increase implementation and accountability systems. Four key lessons emerge from entrusting district-level decision-making.

First, local communities, and not distant bureaucrats, must manage land-use planning at the tehsil and district levels. Second, locally developed zoning laws must protect shamilaat, communal and state lands from vested interests and ban high-risk development. Third, reclamation of the encroached commons must be achieved through local-level resilience management action plans that restore the natural flood management capacity. Fourth, districts must develop asset inventories as revenue sources using credible valuation mechanisms for standardised property assessments.

Given this scale, it’s the right time to establish a ‘National Reclamation Commission’ to develop a national framework and provincial guidelines for local actions.

Learning challenge: Learning is expensive. To learn from climate disasters, Pakistan must ‘unlearn’ destructive practices: ending floodplain encroachment and not treating communal lands as private profit centres. This process can be negotiated but requires decisive political pushback against powerful networks.

Despite decades of disasters, Pakistan repeats its mistakes: allowing encroachment, enabling elite capture, treating prevention as an expense rather than an investment. Lessons remain unlearned because learning requires confronting power, not merely studying flood patterns or providing relief assistance.

True climate adaptation demands political consensus and the courage to implement what we already know but refuse to do. Let the NFC award spearhead this transformation.

The writer is a climate change and sustainable development expert.

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2025

THERE was a sense of déjà vu when Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Tuesday ‘formally’ launched Pakistan’s New Energy Vehicle Policy 2025-30. The same policy had, after all, been ‘officially’ launched on June 19, according to a PID press release issued on the same date. Perhaps the government is so enamoured with this achievement that it felt it necessary to talk about it twice. All that seemed different this time was the presence of the prime minister and his gifts. He handed over several electric scooters to high-achieving Intermediate students, promising more in the years to come. His office insisted that this event formally marked the effective date of the NEV policy. All this is well and good: one hopes that the actual policy will yield its intended benefits. The last attempt to formalise Pakistan’s approach to NEVs quickly fell apart. Launched in 2019 by the PTI government, the previous policy was abandoned due to the upheaval caused by Covid-19. Now, the government has reworked it and presented it as a means to save billions annually on petroleum imports and reduce urban air pollution, “which costs us over Rs105bn in healthcare and productivity losses”.

These are noble aims, indeed. The NEV policy’s ambition also deserves to be applauded: it aims for 30pc of all new vehicle sales to be electric by 2030, and sets an even more enterprising goal of 90pc by 2040. If these benchmarks can be achieved, it would mean this government would have triggered an energy revolution as significant as Pakistan’s globally celebrated transition to solar energy. However, many concerns remain about the policy’s viability. The key question is whether vehicle manufacturers will pass on real incentives to consumers, or repeat the industry’s old practice of maintaining high margins and giving minimal thought to the environmental impact of their activities. Unless the value proposition of NEVs becomes clear to consumers, those targets will prove difficult to attain. A key concern will be the quality of batteries sold in Pakistan, which the government must consider regulating. Charging infrastructure and battery-swapping facilities will also require sustained investment over a long period of time. Therefore, instead of grand events to celebrate NEVs, what Pakistan needs more is commitment and consistency. It has sown the seeds; now it must water the soil and hope it bears fruit.

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2025

PUNJAB is reeling from massive flooding triggered by a combination of torrential rains and excess water released by India from the Ravi, Chenab and Sutlej rivers.

The three eastern rivers — allocated to India under the Indus Waters Treaty — are now experiencing medium to exceptionally high floods, with forecasts of more rain across several districts of the province, particularly in the catchment zones of the flooded areas.

A major rescue operation has been launched, with over 200,000 people evacuated and relocated to relief camps for medical care, food and other essential services since mid-August. Army troops have been deployed in at least eight districts to assist the civil authorities in moving residents to safety as floodwaters surge downstream, devastating hundreds of villages along the way.

Officials have warned that very high to exceptionally high flooding could hit multiple districts, including Lahore, in the next few days as water levels in the three rivers continue to rise. Besides riverine flooding, major cities such as Sialkot, Gujrat, Rawalpindi and Lahore have been battered by urban flooding caused by intense downpours. The extent of damage to crops, infrastructure, livestock, homes and other assets is yet to be fully assessed. But initial estimates suggest the losses are in billions of rupees.

The devastation of recent days exposes the provincial authorities’ weak state of preparedness, despite repeated warnings of unusually heavy rains and excess water releases by India, whose upstream river catchment areas have also received torrential downpours.

The situation exposes the ruling elite’s deep indifference towards the flood-vulnerable communities. This was underscored by Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz’s decision to visit Japan and Thailand — accompanied by her core team, including senior provincial bureaucrats as well as family members — at such a crucial time, instead of staying back to lead the response and devise a strategy to tackle the emerging crisis.

This attitude has justifiably earned the Punjab government much criticism. That said, the growing severity and frequency of floods with each passing year calls for holistic, integrated planning across governance structures to build resilience and preparedness to proactively mitigate the impact on vulnerable populations.

No doubt, Punjab, like the rest of Pakistan, is trying to deal with the challenge of climate change, the main trigger of extreme weather events across the country. But climate change alone is not responsible. Unplanned urbanisation, deforestation, an inadequate flood-resilient infrastructure, poor river management, etc, have all aggravated the situation.

The lesson is unmistakable: floods can no longer be dismissed as merely a by-product of climate change. Unless Punjab starts investing in climate-resilient infrastructure and adopts effective adaptation strategies, it will not be able to build the capacity it needs to minimise the impact of the devastation.

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2025

ISLAMABAD: The Gates Foundation will support the World Health Organisation (WHO) in its partnership with Pakistan to strengthen preparedness and the response to ongoing monsoon floods, meeting health needs for over 465,000 people most affected people across 33 high-risk districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan.

The donation from the Gates Foundation, totalling US$ 1 million, will support Pakistan’s national and provincial authorities in ensuring the continuity of life-saving health services by strengthening disease surveillance, outbreak response, the availability of essential medical supplies in targeted locations, health sector coordination, and risk communication and community engagement (RCCE) to provide life-saving information.

According to a statement, the initiative, to be implemented over the next six months, will pay particular attention to pregnant women, children under five, older people, people with disabilities and internally displaced people (IDPs).

“We are particularly thankful to the Gates Foundation for this generous and timely support to WHO teams in the field supporting federal and provincial authorities to meet health needs, deliver medical supplies and save lives. As the climate crisis fuels ever more extreme monsoons and natural disasters, evidence shows that a rapid response and good preparedness are essential to preserve public health,“ said WHO Representative in Pakistan Dr Dapeng Luo.

He said WHO stands with Pakistan to save lives today and build stronger, more resilient health systems for tomorrow to protect future generations.

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2025

• Commissioner says breaches ordered by CM
• Three boys drown in floodwater in Gujrat district
• Palkhu drain overflows near Wazirabad

GUJRAT: The authorities deliberately breached dykes near Qadirabad Headworks in Mandi Bahauddin district and Khanki Headworks in Wazirabad-Gujrat districts to save irrigation system as well lives and properties of people.

Hundreds of villages in Gujrat, Wazirabad and Mandi Bahauddin districts were affected by the high flood in the river Chenab. According to officials, the rescue teams evacuated and rescued more than 1,080 people stranded in the flooded areas along the banks of the river Chenab, whereas 935 animals were also evacuated from at least 66 villages of Gujrat by the Wednesday evening.

The Palkhu drain also overflowed near Wazirabad railway station, and the water entered various parts of the city, including residential areas, as well as Sialkot Road.

Gujranwala Commissioner Naveed Haider Sheerazi, who also holds the additional charge of Gujrat division, said a deliberate breach was caused through a blast on a road in Phalia tehsil of Mandi Bahauddin.

Gujrat Assistant Commisioner Bilal Zubair said the authorities had planned to breach the dyke at Khanki Headworks near Kot Nathu on Gujrat side on water flow reaching 1.1 million cusecs. However, he said, to be on safe side the breach was created around 15,000 to 20,000 below the mark, adding that the water flow was slightly going down by Wednesday evening.

Irrigation officials say that on Wednesday over one million cusec floodwater passed from Khanki Headworks, which was the worst flooding so far in terms of water rising in such a short span of time.

The local population near Qadirabad Headworks was also evacuated by the Mandi Bahauddin district administration in the wake of the deliberate breach.

From Marala Headworks to Kahnki Headworks, the floodwater affected at least 66 villages, which is the worst situation in Gujrat district since the 1992 floods, says Khizer Hayat Bhatti, Additional Deputy Commissioner Revenue (ADCR).

He added that the rescue and evacuation of the stranded people and their cattle from the riverbed had been continuing for the last 24 hours.

Gujranwala DC Naveed Ahmed, who also holds the additional charge of Wazirabad DC, said the Palkhu drain overflowed at around 35,000 cusecs as its safe capacity was around only 26,000 cusecs. The traffic flow on the road to Sialkot airport, from Shahbaz Pur bridge of Gujrat, as well as from Wazirabad city, has also been affected after a portion of the road connecting Jalalpur Jattan to Sialkot airport, was washed away by the floodwater.

Meanwhile, at least three boys allegedly drowned in the floodwater near two villages of Gujrat.

As per Rescue 1122, in the first incident, Bilal (12) drowned at Nutt Tibba village, whereas two others, identified as Abdul Rauf (13) and Samiullah (12) drowned near Shahbaz Pur bridge near Jalalpur Jattan town.

Gujrat Deputy Commissioner Nurulain Qureshi and District Police Officer Rana Umar Farooq also remained in the affected areas along the river Chenab banks to monitor the rescue and evacuation operations.

Despite warning by the authorities that the people should stay away from the flooded areas, a large number of people, including women and children, from Wazirabad and Gujrat continued to visit the river Chenab bridges on the GT Road, creating hurdles in the traffic flow on the national highway.

According to officials, scores of cattle heads were evacuated by the farmers from cattle farms along the river banks at Mohla, Goraya, Qiladaar, Sandhar and Tarikha villages of Gujrat, where rescue teams also evacuated stranded people.

The administrations of Gujrat and Sialkot districts had also announced local holiday on Wednesday given the flooding of the region.

Meanwhile, Gujranwala Commissioner Naveed Haider Sheerazi said that the breaches near Khanki Headworks was created on the directions of Punjab Cheif Minister Maryam Nawaz to protect further erosion of the land along the river Chenab banks and to save the lives and house houses of the residents.

He was addressing a special meeting at Khanki Headworks late on Wednesday night, where Gujrat DC Nurulain Qureshi and other senior officials were present.

He appealed to the residents of rural areas of Gujranwala, Gujrat and Wazirabad near the river Chenab banks to move to safer places as water level might further rise in the river.

He said the government was making all out efforts to protect people’s lives and properties from floodwater.

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2025

• PM orders NDMA to guard against urban flooding in Lahore, Sialkot and Gujrat
• President asks Sindh to gear up for large flows; Nawaz asks lawmakers to help their constituents
• Minister announces compensation for Danyore nullah victims

ISLAMABAD / LAHORE: The co­­u­­ntry’s federal and provincial lea­d­ership is overseeing a coordinated em­ergency response to the unprecedented flood crisis across the country.

No province or territory has escaped the water’s wrath — be it destruction from flash floods in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, devastating glacial lake outburst floods in Gilgit Baltistan, crippling rains in Sindh or the overflowing rivers in Punjab.

Chairing an emergency meeting on Wedn­e­sday, Prime Minister She­hbaz Sharif directed the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) to take immediate measures to address potential urban floo­ding in Punjab, particularly Lahore, Sialkot, and Gujrat.

The PM was briefed on high wat­er discharge pressure in the Ravi River at Jastar and Shahdara, and in the Sutlej River at Ganda Singh Wala and Sulemanki, with monitoring stations also tracking conditions at Khanki, Balloki, and Qadirabad.

He emphasised the need to enhance flood and rainfall warning effectiveness, stressing timely information sharing between NDMA and Punjab’s Provincial Disaster Mana­gement Authority (PDMA) to minimise losses. He instructed key ministers and officials to reach Lahore immediately to ensure uninterrupted power supply, communication channels, and road restoration.

NDMA Chairman Lt-Gen Inam Haider Malik briefed the prime minister on pre-emptive evacuations, safe relocations, and relief supply delivery, while army personnel and police services have been engaged for damage mitigation in flood-affected Punjab areas.

Zardari directs Sindh preparations

In a statement, President Asif Ali Zardari also expressed deep grief over the devastating floods, extending heartfelt condolences to families who suffered losses of life, property, livestock, and farms.

While appreciating the “exemplary valor and commitment” demonstrated by armed forces and eme­rgency rescue teams during this crisis, he specifically directed the government of Sindh — ruled by his own PPP — to immediately begin preparations to cope with the massive amount of water that is expec­ted to flow into the province in the coming days.

Expressing confidence in the nation’s resilience, President Zardari referenced Pakistan’s successful response to previous floods in 2010 and 2022, stating the country would overcome this trial with similar determination.

PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif has reportedly directed the party’s federal and provincial ministers and lawmakers to immediately reach their constituencies and actively take part in flood relief activities. The directions came at a Sharif family meeting in Murree, where Nawaz, PM Shehbaz and CM Maryam discussed the devastation caused by the floods.

Nawaz Sharif reportedly asked the federal and Punjab governments to effectively coordinate with each other to deal with flood devastation and subsequent relief work.

Meanwhile, the Punjab chief mi­­nister spoke to commissioners and deputy commissioners via video link, and directed them to moblise all resources for rescue and relief operations in the areas affected by flood across the province. She asked the participants of the meeting to ensure tents, food and medicines for the people affected by the flood.

CM Maryam also visited Shah­d­ara to review the flood situation and inspect the safety dam and other measures taken by the administration. The CM directed the administration and other relevant departments engaged in the rescue and relief activities to complete the evacuation process of the population and livestock from the river crossings at the earliest.

Muqam visits GB

Meanwhile, Kashmir, GB and Safron Minister Amir Muqam arrived in Gilgit on a three-day visit to monitor flood rehabilitation and relief activities, highlighting the ongoing threat posed by glacier lake outburst floods in the region.

During his visit, he met families of seven volunteers who lost their lives while attempting to restore water supply in the Danyore nallah. He announced Rs2 million in compensation for each slain volunteer’s family and promised the establishment of a memorial centre.

GB Chief Secretary Abrar Ahmed Mirza briefed the Federal Minister on glacier lake vulnerability, noting that many downstream areas face risks of Glofs. The minister annou­nced that water supply to Danyore, Sultan­abad, and Mohammadabad would be restored soon as rehabilitation work continues.

Syed Irfan Raza in Islamabad, Zulqer­nain Tahir in Lahore and Jamil Nagri in Gilgit contributed to this report

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2025