Some voices have romanticised the idea of letting Pakistan's rivers run untamed, imagining that flows could simply be left to nature.The notion is appealing in theory but perilous in practice,...
Some voices have romanticised the idea of letting Pakistan's rivers run untamed, imagining that flows could simply be left to nature.
The notion is appealing in theory but perilous in practice, particularly in a country where the population has more than doubled - from around 116 million in 1990 to nearly 250 million in 2025 - with an annual growth rate of about 1.9 per cent.
Pakistan faces the overwhelming dual challenge of being one of the countries most severely impacted by climate change, while simultaneously grappling with one of the fastest-growing populations in the world, which intensifies pressure on its fragile water and flood management systems.
Pakistan ranks 167th out of 182 on the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index, placing it among the least climate-ready states in the world. Each monsoon is now a threat not just to individual communities, but to Pakistan's fiscal solvency and national stability.
Record rains and flash floods have once again battered Pakistan. Punjab has been hit especially hard: about 3.8 million people have been affected and roughly 1.8 million displaced since late July, with some 3,900 villages inundated and controlled breaches made on the Chenab to protect cities.
Floods in Pakistan are not only recurring but are escalating in frequency and intensity due to climate change - with studies showing that heavy monsoon rains have become 20-30 per cent more intense and such events two to three times more likely - making them increasingly inevitable in the future.
Based on 2017 estimates, some 95 million Pakistanis - over 45 per cent of the population at the time - reside in flood-prone areas, many on riverbeds, floodplains and drainage basins. New housing projects being approved in these zones, rather than curbed, only heighten exposure. Prevention must begin with zoning discipline and rigorous land-use enforcement: no new housing on floodplains and binding relocation incentives for those settlements already at risk.
The Indus Basin Irrigation System - with 19 barrages, 12 link canals and thousands of distributaries - feeds nearly 19 million hectares, sustaining almost 90 per cent of national food production. Without this vast infrastructure, Pakistan would not exist in its present form. Since the 1960s this backbone has been reinforced by 73 large dams, among them Mangla, Tarbela and Gomal.
Yet even this scale is modest compared with neighbours. India has constructed more than 5,300 large dams since the 1970s, irrigating over a third of its farmland, supporting multi-cropping and quadrupling food output between 1951 and 2000. China's 98,000 reservoirs provide both flood control and the world's largest hydropower fleet.
Pakistan's rice and wheat yields remain significantly lower than India's by about 15 to 30 per cent respectively - not due to inherent soil or climate constraints but primarily because of underinvestment in irrigation infrastructure, inefficient water use and weak agricultural extension services.
What rarely enters headline narratives is that Pakistan is quietly losing the very storage capacity it built. Sedimentation has robbed Tarbela and Mangla of more than a quarter of their designed capacity. This means rising volumes of floodwater can no longer be absorbed upstream; instead, torrents accelerate into the plains.
In 2022, the country suffered its costliest disaster in history: $30 billion in damages and $16 billion in reconstruction costs, according to World Bank and Asian Development Bank estimates. Pakistan desperately turned to external financing. Floods are no longer only humanitarian disasters; they directly affect the economy.
Institutions meant to anticipate and manage water-related risks in Pakistan remain largely dysfunctional and fragmented. The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), Federal Flood Commission (FFC), Indus River System Authority (IRSA) and Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA), along with provincial irrigation departments, often overlap in jurisdiction but underperform in coordination and implementation. Meanwhile, local district administration authorities - responsible for rescue and relief on the ground - report to provincial governments, creating a layered governance structure that hampers unified disaster response and water management.
This complexity results in bureaucratic issues and coordination gaps that limit Pakistan's ability to manage flood risks and water allocation efficiently. Several commissions and authorities have been established to improve sectoral management, but integration at the federal-provincial and local levels remains weak, undermining disaster preparedness and response effectiveness.
IRSA, intended to ensure equitable water shares, has become instead a permanent site of distrust, with Punjab accused of excess withdrawals, Sindh of neglecting the delta and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa left alone to confront glacial melt and flash floods.
Compounding this systemic dysfunction is pervasive corruption. As Defence Minister Khawaja Asif admitted, most roads and bridges collapse not from nature's fury but due to theft and mismanagement, with only 20-30 per cent of earmarked development funds actually spent on projects and the rest misappropriated by those involved in planning and construction.
Catastrophic floods in 2010 and 2022 triggered billions in actual international aid disbursements - about $2.65 billion for the 2010 floods and approximately $4.7 billion for the 2022 floods - yet vital infrastructure like canals continues to leak and embankments crumble, revealing ongoing governance and maintenance failures
Pakistan loses an estimated 27,000 hectares of forest annually. Sindh's riverine forests now cover less than one percent of the landscape. KP's hills, scarred by illegal logging, transform rainfall into torrents. The Indus delta has been stripped of its mangroves, once natural buffers against tides, storm surges and saline intrusion. Their disappearance is already salting farmland and erasing fishing livelihoods.
According to a recent World Bank study, restoring Pakistan's forests and mangroves at scale would require an investment of approximately $2.9 billion over five years to rehabilitate about 3.5 million hectares.
Pakistan's flood crisis is compounded by the absence of reliable early warning. Bangladesh has made investment in real-time forecasting the cornerstone of its adaptation strategy. Pakistan, by contrast, continues to rely on post-disaster assessments and political announcements after embankments give way.
Floodplains are not occupied only by poor squatters. Increasingly, they host elite housing developments and gated colonies: large projects marketed as modern and secure but often carved into vulnerable areas with political patronage.
Pakistan does not lack technical solutions but enforceable governance. A legally binding Indus Basin Council, with cabinet-level provincial participation and IRSA as its technical secretariat, must be empowered to enforce volumetric allocations, sediment management, and trigger-based emergency releases. Its decisions should take immediate legal effect, without awaiting further review.
Nature-based defences should be restored at scale. Reforestation in upper catchments, and mangrove rehabilitation in deltas must be treated as critical infrastructure. Infrastructure investment is equally essential: canal lining where leakage is highest, targeted barrage upgrades, modular reservoirs where environmentally feasible and storm drainage modernization in major cities.
But none of this works without oversight. Real-time river monitoring, automated gauging stations, satellite tracking of reservoir levels and independent cross-province monitors at barrages could curb manipulation and politicisation. E-procurement and performance-bonding for flood contracts, audited by independent technical panels, would close avenues for chronic theft. And the NDMA must be given narrowly defined trigger powers - authority to override bureaucratic delays during peak floods for evacuations, logistics, and targeted water releases.
Pakistan's water crisis is not only a consequence of climate change; it is the predictable outcome of fractured governance, near-criminal neglect of critical infrastructure and the unmanaged decline of ecosystems. The tools to address these failures exist - from large-scale reforestation and mangrove revival to modern early-warning systems, canal relining and independent oversight - but what is missing is political will. Unless rules are enforced impartially, including against powerful interests and institutional coordination replaces ritual rhetoric, the cycle of disaster, costly recovery and empty promises will repeat every monsoon.