The floods of 2025 are not just another chapter in Pakistan’s long history of climate disasters; they are a stark warning of what the future holds if we fail to act. Year after year, lives and livelihoods are washed away, losses are counted, tears are shed, lapses in the system are identified, people’s resilience is put to test but no lessons learned. Each time the governments scramble to provide relief with no standard operating procedures to work on. This reactive cycle must end.

Pakistan needs a paradigm shift: from relief to resilience, from reaction to prevention, and from fragmented responses to coordinated planning.

The floods sweeping through Pakistan this monsoon season have once again laid bare the country’s vulnerability to extreme climate events. What began with devastating cloudbursts in the northern areas and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has cascaded into Punjab, displacing over a million people, and is now advancing with fury towards Sindh. Much of Punjab has already been inundated, exacerbated by India’s release of water into the rivers flowing downstream to Pakistan.

The crisis is not just a humanitarian tragedy—it is also an indictment of our institutional shortcomings, planning failures, and lack of urgency in building resilience despite repeated wake-up calls.

The human toll has been staggering. Since June, over 800 lives have been lost across the country. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Buner district alone more than 270 died, while many others remain missing. Punjab has witnessed over 120 confirmed deaths, and Sindh is bracing for the worst. In total, more than 1.2 million people in Punjab have been directly affected, with 250,000 forced to leave their homes. Livestock, the backbone of rural households, has perished in the thousands, compounding the misery.

The scale of displacement is overwhelming. Nearly 700 relief camps and 265 medical facilities have been set up across Punjab, but these are far from sufficient to meet the needs of those who have lost everything. Families now crowd in makeshift shelters, with food insecurity and health risks growing by the day. Diseases such as diarrhea, cholera, and dengue typically follow in the aftermath of stagnant floodwaters, stretching an already fragile health system to breaking point.

Economic........

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