51 degrees and counting: Surviving heat in Jacobabad

Three days without electricity. A fan barely larger than a dinner plate. A daughter tracking the movement of the sun across a courtyard so that the solar panel powering it does not lose charge. This is how Shabana, 42, survives June 2026 in Jacobabad.

On the afternoon we met her, the heat index touched 51°C

“It used to be hot before as well,” she says. “But electricity did not disappear this often, and water was always available. There has been no electricity at my house for the last three days. It is very hot. We feel very hot. But what can we do? Mujhe tou lagta he me garmi ki wajah se sookh gayi hoon (I feel as though I have dried up because of the heat).”

The Pakistan Meteorological Department has once again warned of intense heatwave conditions across Sindh. Yet for Jacobabad, often described as one of the hottest places on Earth, extreme heat is not an exceptional event. It is a lived reality. What is changing, however, is the intensity of that reality and the growing cost of surviving it.

As part of ongoing fieldwork under the project “Reducing Global Catastrophic Risk from Unseen Climate Extremes”, conducted jointly by the Karachi Urban Lab-IBA and the King’s College London, we have spent time speaking to residents across Jacobabad’s informal settlements, and its surrounding villages. Their stories reveal something that temperature records alone cannot capture: the struggle against heat is no longer simply about discomfort. It is increasingly about survival.

The conversation in Jacobabad has already moved beyond questions of liveability. It is becoming a question of survivability.

Prolonged exposures to heat can be deadly — regardless of fitness, levels of hydration, or access to fans. Yet, the precise risks to the body, and its organs are not well understood, while the potential societal impacts are completely unknown. A city with a population of 219,315 (PBS, 2023), heat is a part of the lived reality of residents in........

© Dawn Prism