When the sun kills and the rivers rise

I still recall being in Karachi in May, seeing men carrying bottles of water running towards a collapsed rickshaw driver at an intersection. It had been over 41°C that day. Ambulances were already in short supply, hospitals overflowing with heatstroke patients. To those of us who survived it, "climate change" wasn't a technical argument. It was a merciless sun bearing down on the pavement, taking lives one by one.

And yet, as melodramatic as these heatwaves are, they're only half the story. In 2022, when floodwaters engulfed one-third of the nation, I went to a small village in Sindh where the school building was half submerged. Children were splashing waist-deep through silted water to save their books. Farmers took me to fields where the rice crop had been destroyed; months of work drowned overnight. Their subsequent planting season was pushed, and their debts continued to rise. That tale was repeated throughout Punjab, Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

This is the truth! Pakistan emits less than 1% of all global greenhouse gases, and yet we always figure among the top 10 most climate-exposed nations of the world. And exposure here is not a theoretical graph; it's our food, our water, our health!

Consider agriculture. Cotton farmers in southern Punjab districts complain that bolls dry out prematurely due to intense heat. Wheat sowing in Sindh has been pushed back because floods deposit water-soaked soils. Consider yourself a farmer who spends months preparing the soil, only to have the weather undo the work in days. When agriculture goes wrong, food prices skyrocket, rural livelihoods fail, and urban families notice the cringe in their daily bread.

Pakistan's water infrastructure is no less strained. Our northern glaciers, which supply our rivers, are melting at a record pace. Monsoon rains, once reliable, now oscillate wildly between drought and deluge. Groundwater is drawn out at a rate higher than it can replenish. And when flash floods cut through Khyber Pakhtunkhwa; as they did this August, they don't just blow bridges and roads. They uproot entire villages!

Our health system, already stretched thin, is caught in the middle. Heatwaves send thousands into hospitals. After floods, cases of diarrhoea, cholera, and dengue spike. In Jacobabad, the hottest city on Earth last summer; families told me they sleep on rooftops at night just to breathe, but even then, the heat is suffocating. Imagine a child with fever in those conditions, with no clinic nearby. That is climate change in human terms.

The urge is to throw up our hands and say: this is beyond us…! But here's the thing; each rupee we spend on resilience saves us many more rupees in recovery. Nations that prepared early, such as Bangladesh with cyclone shelters and early warning systems, demonstrate how being foresighted saves lives. For Pakistan, the playbook is clear!

We must trap and save water in the monsoons rather than allowing it to flow devastatingly downstream. That involves constructing recharge ponds, small dams, and upgrading irrigation so we don't squander what little we have.

We must have agriculture that can withstand these new extremes; flood-and heat-resistant seeds, more intelligent planting calendars, and soil practices that retain moisture. Farmers require insurance schemes that buffer them from disaster when it hits.

Our health system needs to anticipate climate shocks with heat action plans, flood area mobile clinics, and enhanced disease surveillance. An easy SMS alert system to signal that a heatwave is coming can save thousands.

And most importantly, we require a governance that ceases to treat climate as an afterthought. From town planning in cities to water conservation in Thar, climate needs to be integrated into all decisions. This isn't alms; it's survival.

If you're reading this sitting in an air-conditioned office, it may still seem like a policy problem, something for the government or the UN to deal with. But if you get out and walk in Multan in the middle of summer, or speak to a farmer in Dera Ghazi Khan, or see a flooded village in Sindh, you will realize that climate is already determining how we live, how we eat, and how we work.

I think the dialogue needs to change from "if" to "how." How do we protect our fields, our water, our future for children? How do we pay for resilience in a nation already up to its eyeballs in debt? And how do we do this in a manner that benefits all, not only those with privilege?

I do not have all the answers, but I do know this: this problem can no longer be ignored. And if you, like me, have witnessed what steroids of heat and floods are already doing to our people, then you know we do not have time to waste.

Editor's note: This blog has been written with AI assistance for clarity and grammar.