Climate hotspots across Pakistan are being swallowed up. In the north, glaciers are on fire, with 36% on the way to being lost, fueling the threat of glacial lake outburst floods. In the south, rising seas are steadily reclaiming coastal belts.
This double pressure of melting ice and encroaching tides marks a new reality in our climate. Yet every year, when the waters rise, we rehearse the same conversations. And when the floods recede, so too does our memory. Forgetting has itself become part of the climate crisis.
Climate-induced disasters are a global phenomenon, but it is convenient to call these events ‘natural disasters’. Yet that convenience is itself an act of erasure. Floods in Pakistan are not accidents of nature; they are man-made calamities decades in the making.
This is ecocide, a societal failure produced by the decisions of people in power who privileged profit, speculation, and patronage above safety. The middle and poor classes, of course, also build homes in ecologically fragile areas, but this is more the pursuit of dignity through affordable housing. And it is a practice now common across the country. The greater blame lies with institutions and developers who bend laws, with elites who sanction destruction and a state apparatus that has consistently looked away.
Blaming India has become a national reflex, especially when water is released from Indian dams into the Sutlej, sending waves downstream. There is truth in the claim that India will go to great lengths to hurt Pakistan and water manipulation is a real danger. Similarly, Pakistan continues to express concern about Afghanistan’s Shahtoot River interventions, warning that flows into the country will be reduced by 16 to 17%.
Dismissing these claims, Afghanistan argues that the Maidan River, on which the dam will be built, contributes less than 0.5% of Kabul River water at the Dhaka transboundary station. But pointing outward cannot excuse what is happening within. The severity of floods, the collapse of homes and the erasure of livelihoods are overwhelmingly shaped by our own failures of governance, land use and planning. Climate failure here is governance failure. To pretend otherwise is to obscure the cracks that need to be exposed and deepened if change is ever to come.
Each flood season tells the same story: weak institutions, fragile infrastructure, and reckless development. Housing colonies rise on floodplains and riverbeds, sold with glossy promises of security, only to collapse at the first surge. Karachi faces the slow violence of rising seas, while villages along the Indus are washed away in a single night. One jolt, and entire communities vanish like chalk washed from a blackboard. The result is a cycle where the poor and lower-middle classes lose the most: their homes, their livestock, their children’s futures, while those who enabled the destruction escape accountability.
The cracks are especially visible in Karachi’s coastal belts. Entire neighbourhoods are projected to be submerged within the next few decades as sea levels rise. The warning signs are already here: saltwater intrusion into aquifers, disappearing mangroves, and erosion of once fertile coastal land. Yet instead of safeguarding these fragile zones, luxury housing continues to expand into them, marketed as the pinnacle of security and modern living. It is the same story repeated inland: promises of prosperity built directly on ecological fault lines. When the seas rise, these projects will be the first to fall, and with them, the myth of secure development.
This is why foreign loans and climate finance, while necessary, are ineffective if planning remains poor. Money poured into a broken system only multiplies losses. The Islamabad airport is a small but telling example: it cost around one billion dollars to build and was designed to be ‘Airbus A380 compatible’. Yet in all these years, not a single Airbus A380 has landed there, apart from one Emirates flight at the opening for a photo opportunity.
Today, the airport has already been handed over to the UAE to manage, becoming a symbol of waste, mismanagement and dependency. That one billion dollars could have been invested in human development, health and education, areas where Pakistan’s needs are far more urgent. If this is how we plan and spend at the national level, why would climate funds be any different? Without reform, the money will vanish into the same void of waste, corruption and incompetence.
To imagine resilience without reform is to repeat the cycle of forgetting. Climate finance and international aid may come, but money poured into broken systems is nothing more than a bandage on gangrene. True resilience requires vision and resolve: warning systems to save lives, mapping vulnerability to direct resources, permanent relocation from floodplains and infrastructure that can withstand the monsoon’s fury. Above all, it requires memory. To remember is to prepare; to forget is to perish.
The floods will not stop, the seas will not retreat, the glaciers will not suddenly freeze again. But our choices can change. The true disaster is not the water itself; it is our willingness to let every flood, every tide, every storm, drown the memory of the last.
Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed in this piece are the writer's own and don't necessarily reflect Geo.tv's editorial policy.
The writer is an environmentalist and a professor of environmental law.