Each disaster exposes the same truth: Pakistan remains trapped in a reactive cycle, learning too little and preparing too late
- The time has come to unpack what resilience actually means for a society like Pakistan’s, where poverty, governance failures, and climate stress combine to deepen vulnerability.
- Pakistan’s future resilience will depend on how courageously it turns recurring crises into opportunities to rebuild smarter, fairer, and stronger.
By Mohammad Ehsan Leghari
Introduction
Pakistan stands on the frontlines of a global climate emergency that has become increasingly personal, visible, and punishing. Over the past decade and a half, the country has endured a relentless sequence of floods, each more devastating than the last. Since the 2010 catastrophe—which affected more than 20 million people and crippled vital infrastructure—the country has faced inundations in 2011, 2012, 2015, and then in 2022! Almost one third of the country was under water during the 2022 floods, more than 1,730 lives were lost, and economic damages surpassed 30 billion USD.
And again in 2025! The latest floods have left over 6.5 million people affected, displaced thousands of families, destroyed more than 12,500 homes, and taken at least 1,006 lives, with losses in agriculture and infrastructure estimated to exceed $1.5 billion (UNDP, 2025; Reuters, 2025b). Vast farming belts in South Punjab were submerged as 220,000 hectares of rice fields went underwater, forcing over a million people to evacuate. By mid of October 2025, still some area in south Punjab are using boats to commute.
The kacha (Riverine) area of the Indus in Sindh was also vastly inundated, which is indeed supposed to be flooded during high river flows. The political economy of the kacha area is now being redefined as an area enclosed by embankments on both sides to channelize the Indus River and sustain the functions of the three major barrages. Yet we must ask how much of this land was cultivated before the barrage system, and what the population density was then. Making it a permanently settled area can change a flood emergency into a catastrophe. In the post-barrage era, a drastic reduction of floodplain forests has intensified river meandering. It is also important to carry out the comparison between land under cultivation before and after the barrages’ construction, and the trade-offs between economic viability, ecological sustainability, and safety. The balance between “engineering systems” and “non-structural measures” must be examined more critically. A functional riverine zone is needed. It means that the economic and societal model in the riverine area has to be in accordance with the indigenous knowledge and way of living in the riverine area. That is, no hindrances to the flow of water during flood months (which hardly remain three months) and then utilization of nine non-flood months for sustainable economic actions.
Each disaster exposes the same truth: Pakistan remains trapped in a reactive cycle, learning too little and preparing too late. The term “resilience” now appears in every donor report, UN strategy, and government document. Yet, as many critics have noted, it often remains a slogan—a ritual invocation of progress that never quite translates into meaningful change (Folke et al., 2010; UNDP, 2025). The time has come to unpack what resilience actually means for a society like Pakistan’s, where poverty, governance failures, and climate stress combine to deepen vulnerability.
The Real Meaning of Resilience
Resilience is not about merely “bouncing back.” It is about absorbing shocks, adapting to changing conditions, and transforming when the old ways no longer work (Folke et al., 2010). In ecology and social systems alike, resilience represents a capacity—the ability to persist, to adapt, and when necessary, to shift course entirely.
For Pakistan, persistence has meant surviving through floods year after year: moving to higher ground, rebuilding damaged homes, and relying on aid to get through the next season. But this form of resilience—survival without learning—has clear limits. The 2025 floods again revealed how fragile this model is: once farmland is washed away, communities cannot simply “bounce back.” They need support systems that allow adaptation—better drainage, crop diversification, community-led disaster planning, and decentralized decision-making (Nazir and Lohano, 2022).
Adaptability, then, is about learning from crisis. It is about reforming governance, revising building codes, and integrating new knowledge into old systems. Where adaptation fails, systems stagnate in what scholars call “rigidity traps”—structures that refuse to change despite overwhelming evidence of their failure (Folke et al., 2010). Pakistan’s response to repeated floods shows this clearly: disaster agencies activate relief mechanisms but rarely evolve institutional learning.
Transformability—the third and most radical element—involves shifting to entirely new systems when the old ones become untenable. For Pakistan, this could mean reimagining its dependence on flood-prone agriculture or incentivizing urban relocation from high-risk areas. As scholars have noted, major disasters can open “windows of opportunity” for transformation if societies are willing to combine local knowledge with technical and financial support from donors (Anum Aleha et al., 2024). Yet such windows close quickly when recovery focuses only on rebuilding what was lost, not rethinking what must change.
The Geography of Vulnerability
Flood impacts in Pakistan are deeply shaped by spatial patterns—by where people live, how land is used, and how connected or isolated communities are. This is what scholars call spatial resilience (Cumming, 2011). A flood in a densely populated plain like Sindh has very different consequences from one in sparsely populated Balochistan. Geography determines not only exposure but also recovery: how fast assistance arrives, how communities reconnect, and how economies restart.
Recent assessments of Pakistan’s flood management landscape underscore how spatial mismanagement amplifies vulnerability. According to the DRR-Team White Paper (van Steenbergen et al., 2023), the absence of coordinated spatial planning has distorted natural drainage paths and weakened the nation’s ability to evacuate floodwaters effectively. The report highlights that bridges and road infrastructure built across floodplains without proper cross-drainage have constricted the Indus River’s capacity, causing prolonged inundation in Sindh. This structural distortion of natural hydrology demonstrates that resilience cannot be built without integrating spatial planning, drainage management, and inter-provincial coordination into flood resilience strategies.
When connectivity breaks down—when roads, bridges, and communication networks collapse—both ecosystems and social systems fragment. The 2025 floods isolated nearly 1,400 villages, cutting them off from medical and food supplies. This fragmentation mirrors what ecologists describe when habitats break apart, reducing biodiversity and recovery potential. Socially, it translates into exclusion: rural communities left stranded, unable to access state support or even early warning systems (BBC, 2025; Cumming, 2011).
To build spatial resilience, Pakistan needs to think beyond provincial boundaries and invest in networks that link communities—raised roads with waterway underneath, reliable evacuation routes, and digital systems for warnings and coordination. Projects like the Building Disaster Resilience in Pakistan (BDRP), led by UNDP, WFP, and FAO, have demonstrated how coordinated geographic targeting can strengthen local preparedness (UNDP, 2025). But such programs need continuity, not pilot status.
Measuring What Matters
Resilience cannot remain an abstract aspiration; it must be measurable. Melissa Parsons and colleagues (2016) propose a useful framework distinguishing between coping capacities—immediate responses like rescue and relief—and adaptive capacities, the longer-term ability to learn and transform.
In Pakistan, the coping dimension remains weak. The 2025 floods battered factories, homes, and fiscal stability, exposing how poverty and economic fragility amplify disaster losses (Reuters, 2025b). Meanwhile, adaptive capacity—governance, leadership, and community engagement—remains the weakest link. Institutions rarely learn from past failures. Policies exist but are not enforced. Communities participate little in decisions that affect them.
Developing a “Pakistan Resilience Index,” inspired by models like Australia’s ANDRI, could allow policymakers to track progress across regions and sectors. It could measure not just infrastructure readiness but also volunteerism, social capital, and women’s participation in local disaster planning (Parsons et al., 2016). Without gender-sensitive and socially inclusive metrics, resilience risks becoming another technocratic buzzword rather than a lived social capacity.
Why Resilience Remains Elusive
Pakistan’s repeated disasters reveal that resilience cannot be built through aid alone. Billions in donor funding after 2010, 2022, and now 2025 have delivered some localized improvements—resilient schools, improved drainage in select districts, and community awareness programs (UNDP, 2025). Yet, the broader system continues to falter because of governance inertia, fragmented institutions, and weak policy enforcement (Oxfam, 2023). The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) often drafts strategies that fail to move beyond paper due to poor coordination and chronic underfunding.
As the White Paper (van Steenbergen et al., 2023) notes, flood resilience in Pakistan is as much a governance challenge as a technical one. The fragmentation of institutional mandates and unclear responsibilities between provinces have repeatedly undermined efforts to manage floodwaters.
Mental health and social resilience remain the most neglected dimensions. Studies after the 2022 floods revealed deep psychological trauma among displaced families, particularly women and children, with limited access to counselling or community support (The Critical Review of Social Sciences Studies, 2024). The 2025 floods have repeated this pattern, exposing how physical reconstruction without social healing cannot sustain long-term resilience.
Toward a Culture of True Resilience
True resilience requires a shift from reaction to anticipation. It means mainstreaming climate risk into planning, building flood-resilient housing, reforming local governance, and nurturing community agency. It calls for what scholars describe as “learning-oriented governance”—institutions that evolve through experience rather than repeating the same errors (Folke et al., 2010).
For Pakistan, resilience must begin at the grassroots: through education, social networks, and locally led preparedness. Yet it must also extend upward, linking local efforts to national frameworks and global climate cooperation. The resilience Pakistan needs is not about endurance alone; it is about intelligent adaptation and deliberate transformation.
With climate shocks growing harsher each year, the luxury of complacency is over. Pakistan’s future resilience will depend on how courageously it turns recurring crises into opportunities to rebuild smarter, fairer, and stronger.
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References
Al Jazeera (2025) ‘Impact of climate change a harsh reality facing Pakistan’, 19 September.
Anum Aleha, S.M., Zahra, M., Memon, A.W., & Mahar, W.A. (2024) Measuring Community Disaster Resilience in Southern Punjab: A Study of 2022 Floods in Pakistan. Natural and Applied Sciences International Journal (NASIJ).
BBC (2025) ‘Pakistan: More than two million evacuated from deadly floods’, 11 September.
Cumming, G.S. (2011) ‘Spatial resilience: integrating landscape ecology, resilience, and sustainability’, Landscape Ecology, 26(7), pp. 899–909.
Folke, C., Carpenter, S.R., Walker, B., Scheffer, M., Chapin, T., & Rockström, J. (2010) ‘Resilience thinking: integrating resilience, adaptability and transformability’, Ecology and Society, 15(4), art. 20.
Nazir, A., & Das Lohano, H. (2022) ‘Resilience through crop diversification in Pakistan’, in Haque, A.K.E., Mukhopadhyay, P., et al. (eds.) Climate Change and Community Resilience. Springer.
Oxfam (2023) Pakistan Flood Recovery and Resilience Assessment. Islamabad: Oxfam.
Parsons, M., Glavac, S., Hastings, P., Marshall, G., McGregor, J., McNeill, J., Morley, P., Reeve, I. and Stayner, R. (2016) ‘Top-down assessment of disaster resilience: A conceptual framework using coping and adaptive capacities’, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 19, pp. 1–11.
Reuters (2025b) ‘Pakistan floods batter fields, factories and fiscal plans’, 23 September.
The Critical Review of Social Sciences Studies (2024) Psychological Resilience in Flood-Affected Communities of Pakistan.
UNDP (2025) Resilience After Catastrophe. Islamabad: United Nations Development Programme.
van Steenbergen, F., de Sonneville, J., & Saaf, E.J. (2023) Improving Flood Resilience in Pakistan: A White Paper. DRR-Team Mission Report, Pakistan, 30 January 2023.
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Mohammad Ehsan Leghari is Member (Sindh), Indus River System Authority, and former Managing Director, SIDA.
