We keep saving Pakistan. It keeps drowning

In the Balakot graveyard on October 10, 2005, one man wept loudly. Another sat in silence by a grave.

"How many members have you lost?" asked the first man. "I've lost two."

"I lost five."

Two days earlier, at 8:50 in the morning, the earth had convulsed beneath them. The Kashmir earthquake—magnitude 7.6—killed at least 79,000 people, injured over 69,000 more, and pulverized 32,000 buildings. The international humanitarian response was swift, generous, well-choreographed. Tents materialized. Food was distributed. The world felt it had discharged its duty.

But something wasn't adding up.

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R* lives in PECHS Block 6, one of Karachi's more buttoned-up neighborhoods—the kind of place where you'd expect infrastructure to hold. Every year, he fortifies his home against the monsoon. Every year, the rain prevails.

In August 2020, waist-deep water forced him to evacuate his mother, wife, and children. When he returned days later, the furniture was wrecked, documents had dissolved, wardrobes were gutted. Two years later, nothing had budged.

"People enjoy the rain with coffee on their balcony," R* tells me. "But for my family, we worry about saving our kids and valuables."

What R* doesn't fully grasp is the thread connecting these increasingly savage cloudbursts to the consumption habits of Karachi's elite—the sprawling bungalows with their energy-guzzling air conditioners, the imported goods, the lifestyle where needs were eclipsed by wants long ago. The rising waters in his neighborhood are, in a very real sense, the runoff of someone else's ecological appetite.

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The Baghdad sun beat down that August afternoon in 2003, baking the city in familiar, pitiless heat. Inside the Canal Hotel, diplomats, aid workers, and local staff moved with quiet resolve. Among them was Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the UN's Special Representative—a name whispered with reverence in the world's most brutal corners. Bosnia. East Timor. Always the advocate, the tireless navigator of wreckage.

Then the world ruptured. A suicide truck bomb tore through the hotel's foundations, killing twenty-three people, including Vieira de Mello himself. The blast reverberated far beyond Baghdad's streets, a warning delivered directly to the heart of the international community.

We commemorate that day now—August 19th, World Humanitarian Day—with a kind of reverent gravity. But what if we've been commemorating the wrong thing? What if the real lesson wasn't about the nobility of humanitarian work, but about its blind spots?

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In Pakistan's agricultural heartlands, a farmer named Ahmed is inhabiting a new reality. The winters, once predictable and nurturing, have become cold yet truncated, disrupting the delicate balance his crops need. His tomatoes have shriveled. This isn't merely foul weather. It's the fingerprint of climate change, turning fertile land into a crapshoot and pushing families to the precipice.

Ahmed faces a choice: abandon his village, leave his farm, and join the ranks of day laborers in Karachi.

A circle of women in another part of the city speak of weather gone feral. Summers now stretch cruelly, starting in March with an intensity that scalds skin and triggers allergies. "The intensity of the sunlight is so strong that skin burns when we go outside," one tells me. Another worries about the unseasonable heat, which has brought a spike in measles cases.

The electricity bill now balloons, sometimes exceeding the rent. Houses have been sold to pay off utility bills, scattering otherwise cohesive family units. The frequency of fights over bill-sharing has multiplied. Men have the luxury of loitering outside at dhabas, barber shops, or on footpaths. Women have to stay inside.

For these women, the shifting climate isn't about distant policy debates. It's about their bodies, their children's health, the unraveling fabric of their daily lives.

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Here's the thing about Pakistan: it's an anomaly. The country produces less than 1% of the world's greenhouse gases—barely a blip on the global emissions ledger—yet it ranks among the top 10 countries most pummeled by climate change.

Pakistan is heating up faster than almost anywhere else on Earth. By the end of this century, temperatures could leap anywhere from about 1 to 5 degrees Celsius compared to twenty years ago. That might not sound like much, but it's enough to fundamentally rewire how people live.

Flooding used to be occasional. Now it's a recurring national trauma. In 2022, floods submerged a third of the entire country—imagine a third of the United States underwater. Over 33 million people were affected. That's roughly the population of Texas. Pakistan has weathered 38 major floods in recent decades, and experts say 5 million people could face extreme flooding in the next decade or so.

Heat waves are now routine. In 2022, thermometers hit 50°C—hot enough to kill. Droughts persist. The worst ran from 1999 to 2002, then came back in 2014.

And then there's water. In 1951, each Pakistani had access to enough water for all their needs—drinking, cooking, farming. By 2016, that had plummeted by 80%. By next year, it's expected to fall even further. Pakistan is crossing the line from "water-stressed" to "water-scarce"—a threshold that means there simply isn't enough to go around.

Up in the mountains, glaciers are melting, threatening sudden, catastrophic floods. Along the coast, the Arabian Sea is encroaching—what used to be a slow creep of about 1mm per year has tripled to 3.6mm per year. By 2100, the ocean could be one to one-and-a-half meters higher, swallowing coastal areas and pushing salt water into the Indus delta, poisoning two million acres of farmland.

The economic toll is crushing. By 2050, climate disasters could devour up to a fifth of Pakistan's entire economy. The 2022 floods alone caused over $30 billion in damage and losses combined—nearly 5% of the country's entire economic output, obliterated in a season.

Half the crops were annihilated in those floods. Wheat production is declining every year. Orange orchards have lost more than a third of their yield. By next year, Pakistan could face a food shortage of 70 million tonnes. When the floods hit in 2010, they thrust 5 million people into hunger. In 2022, over $5 billion in housing was destroyed. The poverty rate jumped nearly 4 percentage points.

Drive along Karachi's M-9 motorway and you'll see straw-built settlements scattered along the roadside—people who were displaced by the 2010 floods and never went home. By 2050, Karachi could harbor 2.3 million climate refugees. Right now, only one in five Pakistanis has access to clean water. The rest—80% of the population—depend on polluted sources, which leads to regular eruptions of waterborne diseases. When the 2022 floods hit, 22,000 schools were damaged or destroyed.

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There's a concept in sociology called the Giddens Paradox, named after the British sociologist Anthony Giddens. It describes our difficulty in acting against an existential threat whose impacts feel abstract.

Climate change's dangers are undeniable, but its effects feel distant from daily life, making us complacent. By the time floods, extreme weather, or sea-level rises become impossible to ignore, the window for prevention has slammed shut. We struggle to mobilize public and political will for a crisis we can't yet feel or see.

In Pakistan, this paradox is particularly acute—and it's made worse by decision-maker inertia and something else: the false sense of accomplishment that disaster relief provides.

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Here's what happens after a flood: Aid workers arrive. Tents are distributed. Food packages are handed out. Grateful communities receive help. The aid workers return to comfortable quarters for the evening, satisfied with a day's work well done.

This daily rhythm—effort, gratitude, comfort—can stifle introspection. The gratification reinforces beliefs, simplifying complex challenges and obscuring the actual engines of catastrophe.

Because the real causes aren't being addressed: climate-insensitive infrastructure, unchecked real estate encroachment, myopic government policies, unjust distribution of resources, market-driven lifestyles. All of it contributes to a cycle that keeps already-marginalized communities vulnerable.

The conventional approach to disasters treats them as isolated, sudden events requiring technical solutions that emphasize maintaining law and order. Centralized institutions dominate interventions, affected populations are seen as victims rather than participants, and responses are reactive—occurring after an event with the objective of restoring things to their pre-disaster state. Accountability and transparency are often less emphasized.

There's an alternative approach. It sees disasters and conflicts as part of the normal evolution of a society. It analyzes links with society during normal times to understand vulnerabilities. It seeks solutions that change relationships and structures within society to make it less vulnerable. It pushes for decentralized interventions, treating victims as partners. It prioritizes mitigation, viewing disasters not as purely destructive events but as openings for transformation.

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Women pay disproportionately for climate change. Longer summers, erratic rainfall, and intensified sunlight translate into heightened health issues, disrupted agriculture, and diminished crop quality. In cities, heat waves and urban flooding exacerbate psychological, economic, and intellectual disadvantages. Sociocultural norms complicate their ability to adapt.

Yet women's voices are systematically excluded from policymaking, sidelined by internal gender disparities and retrogressive norms. Policymakers demonstrate what can only be called intellectual impotency in grasping the intricate link between gender and climate. Resource scarcity compounds the problem, impeding both mitigation and adaptation efforts.

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World Humanitarian Day arrives each August 19th with its commemorations and commitments. But perhaps it should serve as something else: an inflection point, a moment to reshape disaster management strategies entirely.

The climate crisis demands more than reactive, piecemeal interventions. It requires a holistic and proactive approach. We need to see disasters not as isolated events but as openings for systemic change, with a focus on reducing vulnerabilities before they compound.

This means prioritizing mitigation and investing in preventative measures. It means addressing root causes—from climate-insensitive infrastructure to unsustainable lifestyles, from unjust resource distribution to myopic governance.

It means, in short, moving beyond the gratifying work of handing out tents and asking harder questions about why those tents are needed in the first place.

Because the man weeping in the Balakot graveyard, R* watching his furniture float away, Ahmed abandoning his farm, the women trapped indoors by unbearable heat—they don't need our sympathy. They need us to stop treating the symptoms and start addressing the disease.

Mansoor Raza is a lecturer at the Development Studies Program at NEDUET and can be reached at mansooraza@gmail.com