Drought Action Plan After years of backbreaking swings between drought and flood, Pakistan has finally moved to draft a National Drought Action Plan. It comes late. No qualms about that. Just last year saw the country grapple with a drier-than-average winter, slide into one of the harshest heatwave seasons on record and then endure a monsoon season that brought compound disasters instead of relief. As a perfect finishing act, Pakistan closed the year staring at unprecedented transboundary water strain on its eastern border.
Nevertheless, officials now say that they want to move from reaction to risk management and from emergency relief to preparedness as far as extreme weather events are concerned. Sadly, the trouble is that the country keeps announcing feel-good forecasts while burying citizens under the debris of neglect. On the heels of a news cycle urging cautious optimism, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was counting its dead after roofs and walls gave way.
Perhaps that is the real climate story. One, that rarely enters corridors that matter. Drought or flood, the people put in harm’s way are almost never those with secure housing, private healthcare, or the means to leave. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the latest disaster management figures show 17 dead and 56 injured, including 14 children, most of the victims of roof and wall collapses. These are not spectacular disasters in the cinematic sense. They are household disasters, the sort that strike mud walls and overcrowded homes first. Quietly. Repeatedly.
The drought side is no less punishing. Pakistan Meteorological Department data show that most regions received below-normal rainfall in February and temperatures ran 2°C to 4°C above normal across much of the country. NDMA’s early warnings point to persistent drought across large parts of Balochistan, while districts in Sindh remain under watch. Pakistan has seen this ruin before. At a biblical scale!
The 2022 floods affected around 33 million people, damaged more than 2.2 million homes, and led to damage and economic losses exceeding $30 billion, with reconstruction needs estimated at above $16 billion. This nightmare was supposed to force a structural shift. Yet, the country still lurches between weather extremes as if each one were an ambush. NDMA’s own disaster risk reduction strategy calls for risk-sensitive land use and building codes, which now reads less like policy and more like an admission of failure.
We have already lost too much time burying our heads in the sand. Climate vulnerability in Pakistan is not only about glaciers, emissions, or international injustice, though all of that matters. It is also about socioeconomic class, dead public investment, and the routine toleration of unsafe settlements because the exposed are politically cheap.
