Ali Nawaz Rahimoo

With a population of nearly 1.65 million people and around six million livestock, Tharparkar sustains a traditional desert economy in Sindh. For centuries, life here has been shaped by harsh socio-economic realities, but the growing impacts of climate change are now worsening survival risks for its people. The annual monsoon rains, once considered a blessing for this arid region, have increasingly become a source of tragedy. Among the most destructive consequences are lightning strikes, which kill dozens of people and thousands of animals every year, causing both human and economic devastation. While the monsoon rains bring life to the desert lands of Thar, they also become the cause of many tragedies. The greatest among these is lightning strikes, which claim human lives every year and cause significant losses to livestock.

Rising casualties and losses

According to official data, in the past five years alone, more than 107 people and 3,102 animals have died due to lightning strikes in Tharparkar. This year’s monsoon season has continued the grim trend.

On August 19, 2025, three lightning incidents near Nagarparkar killed one person inside his home.

In separate incidents near Islamkot, lightning killed 56 animals, including 27 cows and two goats.

In another nearby village, lightning killed 92 animals, including a cow and a camel.

Three days earlier, lightning killed 66 goats in Islamkot.

Yet another strike killed 51 goats in a separate village.

In total, over 150 livestock deaths have been reported so far this monsoon season. Since Tharparkar’s economy heavily depends on livestock, such losses push already vulnerable families into deeper poverty and food insecurity.

A desert at risk

Tharparkar’s geography makes it especially prone to lightning strikes. Its flat desert terrain, lack of tree cover, and geological composition mean people and animals spend much of their time in open fields exposed to direct strikes. Victims are often children, herders, or farmers from poor communities. Research indicates the region faces an estimated 100,000 lightning strikes annually far above the global average of 25,000 due to its unique combination of meteorological, topographical, and climatic conditions. High daytime temperatures, humid winds from the Arabian Sea, and atmospheric instability during monsoons create perfect conditions for intense thunderstorms. Local communities also link the increase in lightning to coal mining and power projects in Thar, though scientific evidence on this remains inconclusive.

Psychological and social toll

Beyond economic loss, lightning has created widespread fear. Many residents avoid working in the fields during monsoon sowing season, disrupting agricultural cycles and livelihoods. What was once seen as life-giving rain is now regarded with suspicion and dread. In the absence of scientific knowledge, communities often rely on superstitions, myths, and folklore for protection, leaving them without effective safety practices.

Precautionary measures

Experts recommend a number of practical steps to minimize risks:

Avoid open fields during thunderstorms.

Do not shelter under tall trees or near structures that attract strikes.

Crouch low to the ground when thunder begins.

Construct protective shelters for livestock.

Despite these basic guidelines, a lack of awareness campaigns and weak government preparedness mean rural communities remain exposed.

The way forward

Scientists stress the need for multidisciplinary research to better understand lightning patterns in Tharparkar. Improved warning systems, emergency response protocols, and safety guidelines tailored to local realities are urgently required.

Authorities should prioritize:

Installing protective infrastructure such as lightning rods and earth rods.

Launching awareness campaigns through workshops and community meetings.

Developing emergency response systems for schools, health centers, and villages.

Conducting independent studies on the environmental impact of coal mining and power projects

The scale of the crisis highlights that lightning in Tharparkar is no longer just a seasonal hazard but a recurring social and economic disaster. With climate change intensifying extreme weather events, the region’s vulnerable population cannot be left to face this threat alone. Workshops, village meetings, and school-based awareness programs can play a key role in teaching locals precautionary measures such as avoiding open fields during storms, refraining from sheltering under tall trees, and constructing livestock shelters. Government agencies, in partnership with non-governmental organizations, research institutes, and civil society, must develop coordinated mitigation strategies. Unless urgent measures are taken, each monsoon will continue to bring not just rain but also tragedy, eroding the fragile livelihoods of Thar’s people and deepening the cycle of poverty in one of Pakistan’s most climate-vulnerable districts.

Read: Karoonjhar Hills: Timeless Hub of Heritage

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Ali Nawaz Rahimoo, based in Umerkot, Sindh is a social development professional. He can be contacted on anrahimoo@gmail.com 

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By Rehan Khan Khushik

Karachi, Sindh

Sindh Flood Emergency Rehabilitation Project (SFERP) of provincial government signed two separate agreements with National Rural Support Program (NRSP) & Sindh Rural Support Organization (SRSO) to engage them as social mobilization partners for the provision of livelihood support amounting to US$75million for the affected people of flood hit areas in rural Sindh.

The agreement was signed by Asghar Kanasro, on behalf of SFERP and Ghulam Mustafa Jamro, RGM Regional General Manager on behalf of NRSP while Dittal Kalhoro signed on behalf of SRSO on Monday. The signing program was held at planning and development office Karachi.

“These two organizations will assist in the disbursement of funds to the communities under this scheme in a transparent manner,” said Asghar Ali Kanasro project Director SFERP.

“This program is designed to assist the severely flood-affected communities to enable them to earn livelihood by engaging semi-skilled and unskilled labor for the rehabilitation of urgent basic services including clean water supply, sanitation, watercourse improvement, landscape restorations, road construction as well as its maintenance,” said Asghar Ali Kanasro.

“It will also cover provision of emergency support to smallholder livestock farmers to restore their animal stock and avoid losses due to animal diseases and underfeeding,” he said.

Kanasro said, “This program will cover severely affected Talukas and Union Councils, which will be prioritized on the basis of damage assessment made by the Sindh Government for livelihood assistance.”

“The women and elderly people will be preferred to carry out restoration activities who will be given a chance to participate in local rehabilitation,” he added.

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Smriti Mallapaty

Billions of people worldwide rely on around 50,000 species of wild plants and animals for food, energy, medicines and income, according to a major intergovernmental report prepared by dozens of scientists. Although the report finds that overexploitation is a threat to some species, it also highlights many examples of wild species being used sustainably, and recommends ways to support and replicate those methods.

But independent scientists say that the assessment falls short in its assessment of people’s uses of wild species. They point to significant gaps in the evidence underpinning the assessment. It “underestimates the harm that exploitation of wildlife does to nature and it exaggerates the benefits”, says biologist Daniela Freyer, co-founder of the conservation organization Pro Wildlife in Munich, Germany.

A summary of the assessment, which was conducted by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), was released on 8 July, with a full report to come in a couple of months. It will follow a 2019 IPBES report, which found that exploitation of wildlife is one of the largest drivers of biodiversity loss. The latest report builds on that finding and sought to offer a more optimistic message, says Marla Emery, a co-chair of the assessment.

Sustainable pathway

The report, whose authors consisted of individuals with Indigenous and local knowledge, as well as scientists nominated by governments, reviewed more than 6,200 sources, including research papers and reports. From those, they calculated that people rely on roughly 33,000 species of plants and fungi, 7,500 species of fish and aquatic invertebrates, and 9,000 species of amphibians, insects, reptiles, birds and mammals. However, those are probably conservative numbers, says John Donaldson, another report co-chair.

According to one assessment cited in the report, of about 10,000 species used by people, roughly one-third have stable populations, which suggests they are being used sustainably. The rest show evidence of population declines, which could be driven by humans.

But Alice Hughes, a conservation biologist at the University of Hong Kong, questions how sustainable the use of some species described in the report actually are. For instance, the assessment does not consider whether trade affects animals’ morphology, she says. Trade that removes large ‘trophy’ animals from an ecosystem could reduce the size of the animals left behind, shrinking the gene pool and making them less resilient to environmental changes, says Hughes.

Pandemic link

Researchers also question the decision not to prioritize how wildlife overexploitation affects disease outbreaks. The close interactions between people and wild animals has become a hot topic, given the strong evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic probably originated in a wildlife market in Wuhan, China. “Governments are going to take the exploitation of wild animals more seriously when they realize that there are genuine biosecurity risks,” says Hughes.

Emery says that a previous IPBES report focused on the link between wildlife and pandemics, whereas this report concentrated on the uses of wildlife.

Factors that contribute to the unsustainable use of wild species include unregulated global trade and increased demand, armed conflict and climate change. The report finds that giving communities secure land rights, together with awareness-raising and scientific research, can support sustainable practices. The assessment recommends that policies are designed to ensure that the costs and benefits of using wildlife are shared equitably, and that they draw on diverse forms of scientific and local knowledge.

The report reveals just how reliant people are on wild species globally, says Anastasiya Timoshyna, program coordinator for TRAFFIC, a wildlife-trade monitoring network in Cambridge, UK. These insights “couldn’t have come at a better time”, she says. Countries are currently negotiating the next global biodiversity agreement, which will set the conservation agenda until 2030.

Data gaps

But some researchers point to significant gaps in the evidence underpinning the report’s assessment. It probably vastly underestimates the total number of species being traded, says Hughes. For example, in May, she and her colleagues found that 1,264 species of arachnid are being traded, most caught in the wild, and many of those are probably not accounted for in the report1.

Data on some of the species the report finds are being used sustainably are also lacking, say researchers. It is difficult to conclude that species are being traded sustainably on the basis of limited scientific evidence, says Mark Auliya, a conservation biologist at the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change in Bonn, Germany.

The report also fails to grapple with how much of the wild species’ use is for people’s survival, as opposed to for luxury items, and potentially dispensable, says Stuart Pimm, a conservation scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. “There are some really tough questions for which we need to have good quantitative answers.”

Data are especially sparse on the use of wild plants and trees. Even for highly valuable commodities such as timber, most trees are traded under genus or other collective names, without knowledge of their species, says Malin Rivers, who leads conservation efforts at Botanic Gardens Conservation International in London. “As one species gets depleted in the forest, people just move on to the next species.” But even with limited data, it is important to use the best available information to draw conclusions, she adds.

Emery says that the report’s authors carried out a comprehensive review of sources available until April 2021, so will have missed some of the latest research. She also acknowledges that massive knowledge gaps remain around the use of wildlife and whether that is sustainable, which is a finding of the assessment. But data gaps shouldn’t slow efforts to implement sustainable practices, she says. “We want as much science as we can get, but there is already a deep and important source of knowledge that we can use — and this is Indigenous local knowledge.”

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Courtesy: Nature

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Monitoring Desk

Karachi

A 200-year-old temple here in Pakistan’s largest metropolis is not only an important place of worship for the minority Hindu community in the country but also a source of livelihood for the young and enterprising Muslim boys in the area.

Members of the Hindu community visit the Shri Laxmi Narayan Mandir located at the Native Jetty Bridge close to the Karachi Port regularly for worship and during religious festivals, and this has given an unusual livelihood for the local Muslim boys.

The temple is important for the Hindus as according to Ramesh Vankwani of the Pakistan Hindu Council it is also a sacred place for performing funerals and other religious rituals by the sea.

“It is the only temple located at the banks of a creek in Karachi,” said Vankwani, who is also a member of the National Assembly.

“This temple is important because we Hindus need access to seawater as one of the essential things to perform worship. We throw many objects into the seawater as part of our rituals,” said the lawmaker.

Shafiq, a local Muslim youth, said Hindus who come to the temple throw many things including valuables into the seawater under the bridge as part of their rituals and this means the local boys can earn their livelihood by collecting them from the Arabian Sea.

Shafiq, 20, and 17-year old Ali along with some others dive into the sea from time to time to retrieve the objects thrown by the worshippers and visitors to the temple.

According to Shafiq, the boys have found gold jewelry, silver ornaments, coins and other valuable objects from the seawater.

“We have now trained ourselves and become expert divers, swimmers and can keep underwater and hold our breath for a long time as we search for the objects,” he said.

Asked whether the visitors to the temple or its caretakers object to them retrieving and taking away objects given as part of religious rituals, Ali said sometimes they are shouted at and told to go away.

“When the heat is on we disappear for a few days but return to our spot under the bridge. We remain here till the temple is open for worship. Throughout the day we are in the seawater searching for the thrown objects,” he said.

Asked what they did with the objects retrieved from the sea, he said they sold them.

“We have found many things in the sea in the last few years. The Hindus who come here are very devoted in their worship and to their rituals,” Shafiq said.

But Ali complained that these days there was no rush at the temple due to the coronavirus pandemic and it has made their livelihood more difficult.

“Nowadays there is less rush because of the coronavirus problem. We also follow social distancing for the devotees. We don’t allow more than four or five people into the temple at same time,” explained Vivek, one of the caretakers at the ancient temple.

Eight years ago, the Sindh High Court stopped the Karachi Port Trust authorities from demolishing the temple when a big recreation spot and food court, now known as Grand Port, was being built close to the temple.

Pakistan is home to several temples revered by Hindus. The Katas Raj temple in the northeastern Chakwal district and Sadhu Bela temple in southern Sukkur district are the two most-visited sites by Hindus, who form the biggest minority community in the Muslim-majority Pakistan.

According to official estimates, 75 lakh Hindus live in Pakistan. However, according to the community, over 90 lakh Hindus are living in the country.

Majority of Pakistan’s Hindu population is settled in Sindh province where they share culture, traditions and language with their Muslim fellows.

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Courtesy: Indian Express/Press Trust of India (PTI)

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