Pakistan’s Flood of Floods: Climate Crisis and Human Rights (Part 1)

Written by Irfan Ali, Country Coordinator for Pakistan

Another sweltering summer has brought a familiar tragedy to Pakistan’s northern regions. In mid-August 2025 heavy rain and sudden cloudbursts triggered flash floods across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan. The National Disaster Management Authority reported at least 700 people killed and dozens missing as villages were swept away by a “rare” cloudburst in Buner district. One local survivor, Muhammad Sher, said 30 homes were lost where only five had stood, describing how a flood “wiped out our entire village”. These floods follow a recent history of catastrophic floods 2022’s “super-flood” alone swamped a third of Pakistan, killing about 1,700 people and affecting 33 million. According to a 2025 Al Jazeera analysis, the 2022 floods caused roughly US$14.8 billion in damages and $15.2 billion in GDP losses. (Other estimates push the total economic hit toward $30–40 billion Arab new ABCNEWS.) Smaller floods in 2021, 2020 and earlier monsoon seasons, as well as record heatwaves, have become routine, giving rise to grim new marks like “flood of floods.”

Pakistan is one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries. Its population of over 250 million suffers disproportionately from shifting weather patterns. Experts link the recent 50–60% above-normal monsoon rainfall to climate change. Glacial melt in the Himalayas and Karakoram accelerated by rising temperatures also feeds rivers and triggers flash floods. Notably, Pakistan contributes <1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it bears a huge climate burden. In June 2025 Pakistan’s climate minister lamented this “crisis of justice,” pointing out that top emitters (the US and China) account for ~45% of emissions, while Pakistan gets only a tiny share of “green financing” despite relentless flood(Aljazeera News). International climate rankings have repeatedly ranked Pakistan among the hardest-hit nations for example the Climate Rate Index (2025) named Pakistan #1 most-affected in 2022, largely due to the catastrophic floods.

Despite this climate onslaught, policy and governance failures have left Pakistan poorly prepared. Decades-old environmental laws, like the Pakistan Environmental Protection Act (1997) and subsequent frameworks, exist on paper but suffer from chronic underfunding and weak enforcement. A confidential draft by the federal government’s Rightsizing Committee has suggested abolishing the Pakistan Environmental Protection Agency (Pak-EPA), pointing to persistent failures, weak capacity, and bureaucratic inefficiency, sources cited by ProPakistani. The draft critiques Pak-EPA’s performance, stating that its mandate is far greater than its actual capacity and influence. It portrays the agency as merely a “box-ticking exercise” with little effect on environmental enforcement, particularly after regulatory powers shifted to the provinces in 2010. Similar weaknesses afflict flood management and urban planning. A World Bank led Post-Disaster Needs Assessment after the 2022 floods found “underlying institutional and systemic challenges” including poor urban planning and water management, lack of infrastructure maintenance, complex governance, and limited disaster-risk capacity. In other words, dikes, canals and drainage have been neglected. New laws have been slow: only in 2024 did Pakistan enshrine the right to a clean environment in its constitution. Meanwhile, millions live in low-quality housing or informal settlements on floodplains. When floods come, the results are tragic: entire hamlets can be washed away, as residents in Buner witnessed.

Government response has repeatedly fallen short. In the August 2025 floods many villagers accused officials of failing to warn them. Local news reports noted no evacuation alerts were broadcast in Buner, where an impromptu cloudburst hit without warning. A schoolteacher told that earlier alerts via mosque loudspeakers could have saved lives: “If people had been informed earlier, lives could have been saved”. The NDMA and military insist an early-warning system exists but admit even advanced forecasting cannot predict a precise cloudburst. Meanwhile, heavy rain keeps coming: the NDMA chairman warned that Pakistan had already seen 50–60% more monsoon rain than last year, and more intense spells are expected through September.

To be continued in Part II